From Cairo and Damascus

Fein, Leonard

FROM CAIRO AND DAMASCUS LEONARD FEIN Mena House, and the "Cairo Preparatory Meeting for the Geneva Peace Conference" has begun. I am recovering from my first experience as one of a thousand...

...And for all that, 4,500 years later, the morbid architecture inspires neither awe nor reverence...
...I have never been to Calcutta...
...Syrians are bad people...
...It is large, and as far as the eye can see, the stones are strewn, broken...
...Fared well," of course, means at best that they would have enjoyed physical safety and economic success...
...Not I need that, not I like go like that, not I like he go like that...
...And, since 1964, when the PLO was created, with the endorsement of the Arab states, the brutality of terrorism has been a part of the ugliness Israelis have had to Ijve with...
...I am recovering from my first experience as one of a thousand journalists trying to squeeze through two glass doors to get inside the hotel's central building where the Conference is taking place...
...one finds in it "proof" of inherent anti-Semitism, but it contains also "proof" of inherent philo-Semitism And as to our historic experience in Arab lands, the fact is that the best the Jews could manage was to be protected wards of powerful others—to be patronized (literally)—and the worst was very bad indeed...
...And Sadat, as also the Saudis, will undoubtedly insist that Carter use his good offices to lean on the Israelis, to get them to accept, at least in principle, the idea of a Palestinian "entity" that is independent of Israel...
...They, who have adopted our vocabulary ("diaspora," "exile," and so forth) have also made a greater effort to understand us as we understand ourselves...
...Everybody here in Egypt feel like that...
...The world stands on its head...
...I go to soldier about six years, I go to Israel in 1967, in Sinai...
...The prophet shouts inspirational insights from the housetop...
...Even 1973 did not heal the trauma, for all the emphasis that is placed on the "glorious Egyptian victory" in that round...
...I there four days, maybe six, and then big man of Israel say to me, to about 25 Egyptian soldier, he tell us 'Go out, go out, go Cairo, go Cairo.' Israel soldier say, 'Go out, walk in Cairo, we not want Egyptians here.' I tell him, 'Thank you, thank you.' He tell me, 'Nasser no good.' I tell him, 'Nasser no good.' And then come back in Cairo by walk, about six days walk...
...Some yards off, a man perches atop a one-room structure...
...And we not like Syria...
...In the end, nobody convinces anybody, but I am impressed by the degree of commitment to a solution of the Palestinian problem these people reflect...
...Surely neither the building of the Suez Canal between 1859 and 1869, nor its crossing in 1973, required more meticulous planning, more directed energy...
...I do not see that President Sadat, for all the boldness of his behavior, has conceded anything, and it is a dangerous thing if Egyptian leaders suppose he has...
...There is a brooding fear that in conditions of peace, Israel's energy and coherence will lead to its cultural and economic im-perialization of the region...
...But Cairo is here, where I am...
...But he does not yet appreciate the degree to which the Israeli people have been able to separate peace from policy, the degree to which "no autonomous Palestinian state on the West Bank" has become an axiom of Israeli politics...
...It is for her...
...On one, the tattered bedrolls are resting...
...The matter is, in any case, irrelevant...
...It is insane, of course, that two countries should be so near, and so wrapped up in each other's destinies, and yet so misperceive each other...
...No one does...
...I try, again and again, to explain that Israel's self-perception is quite different, that power is not a part of the Jewish sense of self, that the Israeli sense of threat is very, very real...
...Despite the language barrier, I sense a hostility that goes back far beyond the current dispute between Assad and Sadat, between Syria and Egypt I am hearing, it seems to me, the voice of Egyptian nationalism...
...Myth...
...The Israeli security people4here are quite visibly carrying revolvers...
...If Sadat needs the support of the elite, as most likely he does, he cannot move too far from the Arab world...
...What does he think...
...This begets a frown, and a response: "Why you go Damascus...
...The Egyptians pass the buck to the hotel management...
...and there is no one to answer...
...Perhaps, if peace does happen, the Egyptians will begin to get a sense of us...
...The surprise was in his perception that the Arabs know Israel any better than the Israelis know the Arabs...
...I try to call, but am forced to give up...
...Shukran...
...I mention this to several officials...
...We look at the delegates...
...But the community will also be split, for a substantial body of community opinion holds that Israel could trade a declaration of principle of the kind Sadat seeks for the elaborate security requirements Israel rightly demands...
...They not working, they sleeping, and we not know that...
...It lacks intrinsic appeal, makes sense only as relic, and, as relic, recalls the ridiculous rather than the sublime...
...Not we have a problem Israel...
...Back home now, I am apprehensive about what appears to be a deterioration of the situation...
...People go near house of President Nasser" (indicating a demonstration) "and tell him, 'Not we need Russia.' Problem not Israel, not Egypt Problem Russia...
...Perhaps the Conference has been briefed on the nature of the concessions, although Begin has insisted that Sadat will be the first to know them in full detail...
...Not anybody have money here, not one piaster you have...
...The key becomes Syria, and the United States spends its time trying to persuade the Syrians to be moderate and pressuring the Israelis to be conciliatory...
...Our car pulls up, and we and our cameras emerge...
...Did we fail the Israelis by lining up so quietly...
...I report these interchanges to an important editor, to a cabinet minister, to several journalists and intellectuals...
...the enmity defeats the knowing...
...The hotel staff is busily erecting nine flagpoles, and then hoists nine flags—Israel, Egypt, the United States, the United Nations, the Soviet Union, Syria, Jordan, Palestine, and one which is either the flag of the Giza District Governor, or of North Yemen, or of the Arab League—no one is quite sure...
...I go to TWA, which validates the change, but insists that Egyptair must add its endorsement...
...I know that unemployment is high, but it cannot explain the masses of apparently able-bodied people who crowd the streets during working hours...
...I know...
...Such snobbery, if that is what it is, is not at all uncommon in the developing countries, where the educated elite cannot decide quite how to feel about the laggard masses But in this instance, it is snobbery with direct political consequence...
...As nearly as I can make out, the case for an unblemished record is presented to me so often as a polite form of suggesting that if only the alien European ideology of Zionism had not been imported into the Middle East, the local Jews would have fared well...
...This underpass is their home...
...Nowhere, as our eyes adjust to the sun and to the setting, turns out to be from behind the tombs and from inside the mausoleums...
...The evidence that is cited, time and again, is the West Bank experience, the Israeli settlements there as well as the importance of the West Bank labor force to Israel's economy...
...From their faces, one knows their world has collapsed...
...I go Israel after finishing that meeting" (indicating the Cairo Conference), "go by car...
...This is a new Arab world, and they do not know it...
...I say, 'Where my daughter, where my son?' Grandfather tell me, 'I am sorry, dead your daughter, dead your son.' Not they have to eat...
...it is for self-preservation...
...Asummary of Arab conceptions and misconceptions, based on meetings and conversations with cabinet ministers, intellectuals, editors, others, in both Egypt and Syria: No one I have spoken with understands at all why it is that the Jewish religion—for that is how they see it— requires a nation state...
...One high official tells me that the agency he directs employs 2,000 people although it does not need and cannot use more than 200...
...Cairo's population, about a quarter of Egypt's total, has doubled in the last decade, a thousand more peasants arriving every day), or whether he has concealed his bitterness from me, or whether he is, most simply, a brave man...
...he meant what he said, and he spoke for his people...
...Syria bad people...
...But it is knowable only if one enters it without distorting the ideological baggage, and there is still far too much of that...
...Like so much else, it is unreal...
...If Israel is to make concessions in the weeks ahead, it is not in order to provide reciprocity, not in order to say "thank you" to Sadat It is in order to craft a peace that is consonant with Israel's security requirements and that will be capable of lasting...
...The vast Aswan project merely permitted Egyptian agriculture to keep pace with Egyptian population growth, no more than that...
...The long, dark night that has fallen on the Arabs can either be explained as a consequence of Arab inadequacy, or explained away as a consequence of Western exploitation...
...Again without exception, it is taken as an article of faith, as an axiom, that the experience of Jews in Arab lands was an unmitigated blessing...
...Because of the break in diplomatic relations between Egypt and Syria, I cannot fly, as I had intended, from Cairo to Damascus...
...The Koran, like any holy text, is cryptic...
...The interview complete, the Radio Cairo man insists on interviewing me—in Hebrew, for Leonard Fein was in Cairo and Damscus in mid-December...
...Concessions...
...Yes, I am assured, but it is the Palestinians who are today the victims, and it therefore behooves Israel to take the first step...
...Is it that they are too embarrassed by the Egyptian people, by Egypt's failure, and seek to identify with a more cosmopolitan and forceful transnational community...
...Still, he sends his children to a private school, at great cost...
...I try not to romanticize, not to patronize...
...What can this mean...
...It is a curious conversation, since the Egyptians do not, in fact, speak for the Palestinians, and I surely do not speak for Israel...
...I check to see that this is really the JTA, re-read the article to make sure I have not misread the words...
...When Nasser was here, people not work, not eat...
...This is not the famous City of the Dead, but hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people make their homes amidst these, our stones...
...God willing, I am wrong to be so apprehensive, and He who makes peace up above will help us and our neighbors to make peace here, now...
...There is no way in which the Israelis will be induced to trade fundamental reliance on their own position and strength for external guarantees...
...Once inside, in groups of twenty, we are permitted three minutes in the Conference room, otherwise known as the Rubaiyat Restaurant and Nightclub...
...I go to Egyptair, and they are agreeable—until they see my ticket, which includes a Tel Aviv-Boston coupon...
...Every senior Egyptian official I meet is worried...
...all it is is very old, and very big, and very, very silly...
...The Sadat initiative appears to have confirmed the fundamental approach to the Arab-Israel conflict which Israel has had ever since 1948—to wit, that Egypt is the key to a solution...
...It is time, I think, for the Arab universities to invite some scholars from abroad to lecture'for awhile, time to accept that it has been impossible, until now, to perceive cleanly and clearly...
...That land not for Israel, not for Palestinian, not Egyptian, not Syria, not Libya and Beirut, not for anybody, for all people...
...Instead, I place my arm around his daughter, and I speak words which, though they are in English, will, I know, be understood...
...Muhammad is not a noble savage...
...But Palestinians we not like...
...No, this is not Manhattan...
...The observation will shock neither Israelis, whose press has often printed brutal denunciations of Labor's tepid pursuit of peace, nor American scholars, who have frequently commented on Labor's apparent lack of a peace policy...
...Israel not so strong...
...Russia take money...
...The courtesy of the Egyptians knows no boundaries...
...Reading the minutes of the Knesset or even Israel's daily press is simply not enough...
...We will face a difficult time, then...
...Then here, under a grimy overpass four blocks from the Nile Hilton, I see a family awaken to the exhaust fumes...
...Not so the museum, where 80 percent of the Tut relics that are not on tour in the United States remain, and much more as well, mostly warehoused rather than displayed...
...If it is true, as they say, that Sadat's initiative was born out of his desire to tackle Egypt's domestic problems, then my respect for the man is enormous...
...Whether he is right in his assessment of how much the Israelis know about the Arabs, I cannot say, not being competent to judge...
...Sadat imagines that the popular endorsement of peace which he himself witnessed in Israel will force Begin to accept the fundamental Arab demands...
...Here, up close, it is no more real...
...In the Arab perspective, the entire world—save for the Americans and the Israelis—has long since realized that the Palestine question is the heart of the matter...
...Or else it's magic...
...It is not for propagandistic reasons that Israeli schoolchildren are taught to identify the different shapes of terrorist mines...
...Sadat's speech to the Knesset indicated a decent sensitivity to Israel's preoccupation with security...
...Where are the reciprocal concessions we are entitled to expect...
...So I am worried...
...No problem...
...They argue that that is what Sadat wants, and that the Israelis obviously would prefer such a result, which would permit them to live free of war without forcing them to bite the Palestinian bullet at this time...
...Begin, most likely, will play priest...
...He is young, he nods and motions us towards the house he is finishing...
...Such things are not easily forgotten...
...Is it a concession to prefer peace to war...
...Begin's policies...
...On matters of substance, Sadat has not budged, nor have I any sense that he intends to budge...
...Palestinians bad people, take money from my country, take money from Saudi Arabia, from America...
...If not, the peace will be precarious...
...How can I refuse...
...If things happen that way, Sadat will have won an^enormous public relations victory for the Arabs...
...The ninth is lowered five minutes after it is raised...
...Excuse me, but very big people here, people of army, they very bad people, very bad people, not good working...
...perhaps someone has been holding back...
...Landau refers to Sadat's 1971 statement that Egypt was prepared for a peace treaty with Israel, and goes on to say that "Premier Golda Meir's response was mealy-mouthed and unimaginative...
...It follows that the Israelis initiated hostilities, using the blockade of Tiran to provide them the necessary pretext...
...The man descends the ladder, wipes his hands on his galabiya...
...Such a solution would be vulnerable to attack by Arab radicals, and would thereby give the Saudis great problems...
...Perhaps, but I think the elite is easily deluded...
...I explain that I have come to have my picture taken so I can get the card...
...it was pretty much the rule with members of the Egyptian elite...
...Is it, after all, a concession to "decide" that Israel exists...
...The beginning, presumably, of revision of the conventional wisdom regarding Israel's recent history...
...The Israelis protest to them...
...She carries a pan filled with mud...
...Egypt is the key, but the Palestinians sit just inside the door the key unlocks...
...Whenever opportunity arises, I exploit it: cab drivers, waiters, clerks, shopkeepers, secretaries, anyone with a smattering of English, sometimes French...
...So if that is what Sadat means to do, he is indeed a heroic figure...
...Ikeep no statistics on my conversations with "simple" Egyptians...
...His trip to Cairo coincided with the opening of the Cairo Conference...
...They look at each other...
...Invariably, the information that I am an American brings a warm smile of welcome...
...I cannot refrain from wondering: if Landau is right, and Labor was as unimaginative as he—and others— have suggested, would history have been different had we here, at least in private, been more independent, more critical, more loyal to Israel's enduring need for peace and security, less to its government's policies...
...In his own way, then, he has traveled very far, perhaps more than I. In any case, his stoic story stays with me, and will...
...The current euphoria is breathtaking, and so suddenly has it come upon the region that people can be forgiven if, for a time, they want to wallow about without asking too many tough questions...
...The pyramids, and the Cairo museum Monuments to pharaonic megalomania...
...Rising to the occasion, I reply, "Insha'allah...
...home is where they are, at last...
...I cannot convey the special sing-song quality of his words nor the authenticity of his expression...
...The Sadat initiative has been made possible less by Begin's election than by the Carter Administration, which has finally brought America to accept the Arab view on the centrality of the Palestine question...
...My conversations will not be about the Cairo Conference, but about next month, next year...
...Up until a month ago, his position had been that even if Israel were to accept all the Arab demands, full peace could not be achieved for another generation...
...next month we will publish his report from Syria...
...Several conversations back, I mentioned that I shall soon be leaving for Damascus...
...Thanks...
...The fact is, he went on to say, that we Egyptians know Israel much better than Israel knows us...
...What am I to do...
...These are not concessions, they are confessions of truth...
...Further, there seems to me to be a real disposition to get the Arab-Israel problem genuinely out of the way, and that means to avoid cosmetics, which would insure that the problem would fester for years, ultimately subverting the peace...
...The underemployment is strikingly visible...
...I find that I have missed an appointment with the Speaker of the National Assembly, and that another senior official will meet me two days after I am scheduled to leave for Damascus...
...So do the flagpoles...
...I am skeptical, but that is likely the best we can expect at this point...
...It is the day of the Ismailia meeting, and we are all waiting to learn just what Prime Minister Begin has proposed...
...Since then, I have dropped Damascus into every conversation...
...And we not need Russia...
...The man smiles...
...Language is only one of the barriers to our communication...
...An hour ago, somebody from something called The Village Voice' checked in, and that was a new one for me, and now 'moment'—and I thought I knew America...
...He says, "Im yirtzeh HaShem...
...No one imagined, just a few weeks ago, that the biggest prize of all, a genuine and comprehensive peace, might be available, and I suspect that no one is really imagining it even now...
...He has never been farther from home than Sinai...
...We shall be plunged into despair, our worst fears realized...
...He smiles, one father to another, and this time he accepts the money...
...The mother goes off...
...Catch-22: There is a special Polaroid camera that produces the laminated ID card which alone permits entry to Mena House, site of the Cairo Conference...
...But in Cairo one wants not a Gray Line tour bus...
...From Sadat's standpoint, powerful Israel has little to fear from an independent Palestinian mini-state, a nation—or "entity"—of uncommon geographic and economic fragility...
...Almost as bad as Calcutta...
...People are happy...
...Much uncertainty has attended the meeting...
...I point out that when Begin responded to Sadat in the Knesset, and alluded to our learning from the Holocaust that words and threats are to be taken seriously, he was not using a rhetorical device...
...Has Egypt ever again been so well organized, so purposeful, as when these artifacts were shaped, their bloated housings, geometries of death made possible by death, constructed...
...If it is familiar, that's because one has read articles in the magazine section of the 77/ues, and has already experienced, vicariously, this place, or this kind of place...
...I nod sympathetically...
...Zionism is alien, and its product, the Law of Return.a threat...
...Perhaps a cosmetic formula can be found, some vague declaration of principle which will permit both leaders to claim victory for their position but which will, in fact, postpone the Palestinian matter for some years...
...They may pass right by each other if this continues...
...No, there are the wire service people, as confused as the rest of us...
...His pan-Arabism came as no surprise...
...The masses are easily swayed...
...The cemetery is long-since abandoned...
...they have never seen the Egyptian technocrat working in Kuwait, with Kuwaiti funds, with an amount of money equal to the money of the World Bank, or another who works with the OPEC funds in Vienna...
...Iam on my way to the pyramids...
...He takes the mud, and carefully works it into the roof...
...Nobody knows any more—or less—about next month or next year than about here, tomorrow, but it is the post-initiative period, I sense, that warrants my attention...
...But that is surely no more than Israel was entitled to demand and expect all along...
...And should we not consider very carefully whether we do our Israeli kinsfolk a genuine service by offering blanket, uncritical endorsement to Mr...
...Muhammad, our 34-year-old driver who has been with us since this morning, is speaking...
...What I have heard from the "masses" goes beyond demonstrations, rallies, and the politics of the day...
...I approach the entrance, and am stopped...
...Iam daily subjected to assurances that the PLO is "moderate...
...There is no precedent...
...More important, I fear that such a separate solution, however much it may be preferrable to living with the constant threat of war, will simply insure continuing instability in the region...
...Im yirtzeh haShem...
...Suddenly the mule, as if following a script, lies down and dies...
...on another, the few kitchen utensils...
...Even if Begin himself is disposed to compromise on that issue, Labor Party statements and public opinion polls suggest that he would have a hard time carrying the country with him...
...Never has so much of life been invested in preparation for death...
...No, they tell me, it is nothing more than irritation with the Syrians for having snubbed the peace initiative...
...And then Israel coming for us, and we wait, and we look, and not anybody of big people tell us 'Go, do that, do that,' not anybody of big people tell us what to do, and we wait for big people, and then Israel come, just like that, and I look, and other Egyptian dead, and other Egyptian soldiers go back in Cairo, and big people sleeping all the time...
...I do not know whether I have been witness to the endurance and resignation that is, they say, central to the character of the fellaheen (Muhammad had come from a village...
...Short of that, I do not see how the thing will go forward...
...So, pressure again, and bitterness as well...
...On the weekend of my return, I try to catch up with the news...
...No eat, no drink water...
...The response is always, without a single exception, the same...
...He says that "until the very end, Labor's leaders were mouthing the myth that the Arabs' refusal to acquiesce in Israel's permanent sovereign existence is the true heart of the conflict," that "Labor leaders continued for years to propagate this metaphysical myth as the bedrock of their fundamental policy aim: to do nothing and to gain time...
...This month he reports on Egypt...
...Around the Press Center, people wander aimlessly about, asking one another whether anyone knows anything...
...It is frightening, and painful, to imagine what will happen if, as I fear now, the current effort collapses...
...Even the most moderate, those who are perfectly prepared to contemplate a Jewish State of Israel as an enduring political fact, and who do not feel particularly threatened by that fact, lack understanding of it...
...The substantive question boils down to this: is Israel prepared to issue a Balfour-style declaration that will endorse the concept of a Palestinian national home, subject to such restriction on its military capability the Israelis require for their safety...
...But the smile remains, and the feel of a child's shoulder...
...On walk, find tank, find car, get water here (indicating from the car radiator...
...Maybe my son like me, go to Israel same me, soldier...
...One does not usually think of the Israelis, especially those in any kind of official capacity, as forthcoming and gracious...
...Closing down the cameras, we come closer, slowly, shyly...
...But the instant issue, the fear of Israel's territorial imperative, is the more pressing just now...
...The telephone system here is notoriously ineffective...
...Everywhere I go, there are people hanging around...
...One has heard that Cairo is a disaster area, a city built for two million that now houses, so to speak, nine million, a city which contains a cemetery amidst whose tombs so many people have found shelter that four schools and two post offices have been set up to serve this City of the Dead, as it is called, a place where no accurate census can be taken, where death goes unnoticed and birth unregistered...
...We approach, cameras clicking...
...They give me the impression of being at the level of the British and French Orientalists between the two World Wars, who know the Arabs through books and intelligence reports...
...Nooody seems to know just how to deal with Egypt's staggering social and economic problems, nobody wants to think about them...
...But I cannot quite figure out the process...
...Knowing thy enemy" is—most likely for the Israelis as well—inherently impossible...
...Each side makes only a slight miscalculation in interpreting the options available to the other, but the miscalculations are additive, and there are so many sides that the peace initiative collapses...
...We smile approvingly at the man, walk off...
...Egypt cannot induce the Saudis to endorse or the Jordanians to share in a solution, also because of Syrian and PLO intransigence...
...Israel is seen as an outpost of the West Its ideology is Western, its aspirations are Western, its elites are mainly from the West...
...I say that I hope so, but am not sure...
...The American Jewish community, still enjoying the warmth of hope, will be mobilized for a political response that might well out-do anything we have witnessed before...
...I think they are wrong in their assessment,of Sadat, whose apparent readiness to drop the PLO and find more conciliatory and malleable West Bankers is quite likely a bluff intended to prod the PLO to moderation...
...What Israel needs, I reply, is substantial evidence that the Palestinians can be reconciled to the existence of a Jewish state as a permanent fact...
...Less than an hour later, the Israelis protest to the Egyptians that the Palestinian flag should not be there...
...Their faces say "What next...
...I must fly instead to Amman...
...Nothing is happening, nor will it, until the journalists and photographers have had their look and left the room...
...The second is, obviously, a more congenial interpretation...
...The conversation goes back and forth...
...The man and his son, who had been walking behind the wagon to insure that nothing came tumbling off, crouch beside their beast...
...There is more to the claim of imperialism than meets the eye...
...But the other gap wants bridging, too...
...So one has heard Cairo...
...The history includes both achievement and atrocity...
...Impulsively, I turn back, press a ten pound note into the man's hand...
...No, I cannot enter...
...The transition from euphoria to negotiation will not be easy, and ringing declarations to the effect that "war is unthinkable" do not mean that peace is inevitable...
...And before dead, sick...
...The administrator shakes her head and says, "I really must not know America as well as I thought I did...
...If the peace effort fai Is, we will not face a simple return to the status quo ante, as depressing as that would be...
...And, second, there is a fundamental conviction that it would be a bad mistake to endorse a transparently cosmetic solution...
...The gift that has been given Israel—if it is a gift—is that both the United States and Egypt appear prepared to compromise on the question of full-blown self-determination for the Palestinians...
...it is too much to expect the Arabs to welcome Israelis as teachers and organizers, as models for their own development...
...Insha'allah...
...I suppose it is a different way of packaging a welfare system, although it begets an atmosphere of indolence which subverts the work ethic...
...But I know already that in Egyptian bureaucratese, "one minute" means fairly soon, while "ten minutes" means some time in the foreseeable, but not proximate, future...
...I come Cairo, not see my son, not see my daughter...
...But how can we be asked, as the ad does, to endorse "Israel's peace initiative" if we do not know what it is—unless, of course, we are once again expected to go along with whatever it is that Israel's government proposes...
...Lacking paper, he draws the map on the palm of his hand...
...But it will take a good deal more than good will to come up with a formula acceptable to both Egypt and Israel...
...My son very, very happy He ask me today, 'No problem of Israel?' and I tell him, 'No problem.' He ask me, 'Not to go to army more?' I tell him, 'No more Finish.' Very happy...
...He refuses...
...the priest looks to the subordinate clauses and the semi-colons Sadat is playing prophet...
...I return to my hotel to see whether there are any phone messages, since several government offices have promised to set up appointments for me...
...Later, wandering through the nearby Press Center, I eavesdrop as the Director of the Hebrew Division of Radio Cairo interviews the Director of the Arabic Division of Israel Radio...
...The guide, rattling off statistics of technological achievement, announces that this pyramid took 100,000 people some 30 years to build...
...he has moved out from the traditional society, and wants and expects more for his children than he has for himself...
...For the moment, it seems to me that each side thinks it has the other at a tactical disadvantage...
...There was no rancor in Muhammad's tale, the tale of a former prisoner-of-war who lost two children to starvation...
...Outside again, I watch the episode of the flags...
...But such a revision would be a plausible starting point...
...I surmise that everyone who has to file manages to file a paragraph or two, and that the editor back home weaves the paragraphs into a story...
...I return to Egyptair, and propose to the clerk that we by-pass the politicians at Mena House and begin the building of peace here, between us...
...Ten Egyptian pounds, as nearly as I can estimate, is the equivalent of one, perhaps even two, months' income for this family...
...In Arab conversation, "The Defeat" means 1967, and it has about it the quality of a major historical trauma...
...This mangy animal has been their sewing machine, their grocena, their chance, not for mobility but for simple survival...
...Statements, whether by Israeli leaders or by the King of Morocco, to the effect that Israel's technological skill will provide a great resource for the entire region are seen not as promises but as threats...
...The clerk smiles, and agrees...
...The "extra" 1,800 make it impossible to know who the 200 "real" workers are, and demoralize the entire operation...
...new orders are issued, and we are permitted to enter and acquire our ID cards...
...Instead, they point to Syrian and PLO intransigence and insist that they cannot take any major risks for peace in the face of such continuing hostility...
...But Egypt will not settle, cannot, for a solution which does not provide for Arab sovereignty over the West Bank, whether that means a Jordanian solution or an autonomous state...
...he is a driver, working furiously hard to make some kind of living for himself and his family...
...Heads, he wins, tails the Israelis lose...
...it was meant to be entombed forever...
...Both Egypt and Syria are nations with keen memories of past glories...
...And it is a world that crosses state boundaries...
...And not my wife have work...
...All people love that land...
...At last I learn what is happening...
...What are they to do...
...Today I am looking for an address, and I approach a traffic policeman who speaks no English...
...In this way, they are the victims of their own propaganda as well as of their military and social history...
...How, even in peace, will this nation develop the investment capital—and, more important—the management skills—that will permit it to move ahead...
...But does Sadat recognize how deeply implanted in the Israeli psyche is the fear of the uses to which such a state might be put...
...But in thinking that the commitment of any foreign power to underwrite Israel's security will satisfy the Israelis, Sadat is making a major error...
...until now, we have had only hints of the details of Begin's "plan...
...How long...
...The art here had even less social purpose than the pyramids...
...I present my credentials at the Government Press Office...
...Now Sadat can sue for a peace whose terms must provide a response to that question...
...It is hard to understand—and hard to exaggerate—the degree to which the Arabs see Israel as a mighty state...
...And if they made war when war need not have been made, the explanation must be that they wanted to expand their borders...
...Not they give us water, not they give us eat...
...Small boy, about 12 years...
...broadcast to Israel...
...We are not dealing here with history, but with ideology...
...A very senior Egyptian government official, who traveled with Sadat to Israel, tells me that he was shocked at how little the Israelis know the Arabs...
...I try to point out, again, how very far Israelis are from seeing themselves as victors, and how deeply threatened they still feel...
...they shrug their shoulders in resignation...
...No, they say, we cannot do this...
...I do not know why I am so eager to get inside, but that seems to be the thing to do...
...For as difficult as it may be to imagine Egypt defeating the Israelis in war, it is still more difficult to imagine Sadat making a real dent on the domestic side...
...Since 1947— even before, in fact—Israel has been subjected by the Arabs to a volume of insult and injury unprecedented in its vehemence and its consistency...
...When we finish, he asks me whether I think there will be peace...
...Back at Mena House, where the mood among the journalists is bleak—they've learned that Begin is flying off to see Carter, and the rumor is that Sadat will be going to Washington as well—I look through the piles of teletype reports from the wire services...
...Ours, and those, as fervent, of the Egyptians...
...self-respect is too precious...
...Mealy-mouthed...
...Here and there, a mausoleum, a fenced-in plot with several tombs, large, lavish...
...Only from the elite have I heard concern for the "Arab nation...
...It's odd, and rather disconcerting, that in all my conversations with Arabs, here in the Middle East or back in Boston, the only ones I've met who understand Zionism, who understand Jewish peoplehood, are several militant Palestinians...
...The conviction that Israel has imperialist ambitions is also widespread, and appears sincerely held...
...But here it is, art for death's sake disinterred, stunningly delicate, each unsigned piece enough to have established its craftsman's reputation for all time...
...When will the Israelis respond to President Sadat's initiative...
...I am reminded also of Ahad Ha'am's insistence that nature requires both priest and prophet, that neither can accomplish large tasks alone...
...But the camera is inside, and I am outside...
...My rather skeptical response to these assurances begets a torrent of "evidence" which boils down to one (possibly) important point: Arafat and Fatah could be induced to break from the rejectionists and to settle for a West Bank/Gaza state as a permanent solution, rather than as the first stage along the way to the dismantling of Israel...
...The traffic moves on...
...A block away from the State Information Services building, another mother calmly removes her toddlers' underwear and helps them relieve themselves, as attache-cased bureaucrats walk past, as hawkers advertise their wares...
...I have my ticket, and Egyptair, a precedent...
...Not I have car, go by walk I come inside Israel, I look at people, I talk, they talk...
...I do not insist...
...And, from Egypt's standpoint, Saudi support is essential...
...We feel regret rather than rancor, regret for our ancestors and regret for these, our neighbors...
...We look about, and quite suddenly, are surrounded by people...
...Landau is saying that Sadat and Begin have "detheologized" the conflict, reduced it to a set of disputes over "ordinary" things...
...But Israel is not yet there...
...But I do not think that Israel will issue such a declaration...
...The Israelis suppose that Sadat must come up with a peace package or else face intolerable embarrassment...
...Now, evidently, he is prepared for full peace, for "normalization," as an immediate consequence of a settlement...
...I worry about this aspect, as about so much else...
...Instead, the thing will bog down in each side trying to outmaneuver and outsmart the other...
...Yet the wire service reports all carry a Cairo dateline...
...In deference to their privacy, we stand off, letting the telephoto lenses bridge the gap in space...
...Quite so...
...most often, the response is that it is time for Israel's self-image to accord with Israel's contemporary reality...
...Again and again, I am informed that Nasser did not intend war in 1967, and that the Israelis must have known that...
...But that does not deter the Conference of Presidents, which asks the world to approve Begin's "far-reaching concessions for peace...
...In the Jewish Telegraphic Agency daily news bulletin for December 23, there is an analysis of the peace initiative by David Landau, who also writes for the Jerusalem Post...
...Not even a revocation of the Palestinian covenant, with its promised destruction of the State of Israel, would cause them to be erased...
...My judgment is that Carter will agree, both out of conviction and out of necessity...
...The camera is located inside Mena House...
...The directions are a bit complicated, and he cannot simply point the way...
...one wants an anthropologist, to explain the visual bedlam—a hundred varieties of tradition intermingling with the West, no clear sign that the one is making headway over the other...
...We poke our heads through the door, too embarrassed by this one-room shack to admire the energy of its builder, who stands back with pride...
...When I go to Sinai, for army, big people sleeping...
...There was a time when each was the center of the universe...
...In which case, the new hindsight leads to no new insight...
...Still on Friday, in the Jewish cemetery...
...Take the ticket to TWA and let them do it...
...Ten minutes...
...While I understand and applaud the desire to present Arab history as free of racism, of anti-Semitism specifically, and while I accept that the Arab record on the Jewish question is rather better than the European record, I know enough to identify the axiom as false...
...So he takes a pen from his pocket, and draws a map...
...Over and over, one learns that Egypt must move furiously fast just to stay even...
...Here is some of what he has to say "In Egypt, any Egyptian man, anybody of Egypt, he like Israel now...
...My children sick, and not you have a doctor...
...But the American Jewish community, accustomed for so many years to defending Israeli government policies, may have a harder time with the hindsight...
...Just how hard a time I learn from the ad by the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations in the New York Times of December 25...
...I do not have the ID card...
...Later, on our way back from the Press and Television Center, we will see her returning, her four-year-old child patiently waiting as the trucks and the buses and the taxis and the donkeys move past...
...But my response is also irrelevant...
...I, in the coming days, will be in Damascus, in Amman, in Jerusalem, then in Boston...
...At first, Cairo impresses me chiefly as impossibly crowded, much like mid-town Manhattan during lunch hour...
...Can there be peace...
...I am reminded of Ahad Ha'am's distinction between priest and prophet...
...This requires that my ticket be rewritten...
...It may be possible for the Arabs to accept the Jews as equals, rather than as the wards they have been when resident in Arab countries...
...We step between the graves...
...It is the first day of 1978, and the Egyptian foreign minister has implied that there is nothing to talk about unless Israel is willing to renounce its sovereignty over the West Bank...
...A wealthy community rests here, in the sand, in the stones...
...An hour later, fifty other journalists caught by the same contradiction have joined in the rumbling...
...they will always think Israel tainted...
...I fail to understand that, since if the negotiations break down over the Palestine question—the hardest part of the problem—Sadat can, without too much difficulty, turn around and tell the Arabs that, contrary to their accusations, he was faithful to their cause, but that Israelis were intransigent after all...
...Some of the journalists here are speculating about the prospect of a separate Egyptian-Israeli peace...
...What combination of psychology and theology can have justified this extravagance...
...Wait...
...The daughter clutches her mother's hand, wide eyes downcast...
...In Israel, on my way back home, I was struck by the sunniness of disposition I encountered everywhere...
...I look around...
...What Arafat needs, I am told, is a "bone," some piece of evidence that moderation would pay off...
...They have appeared, as if from nowhere...
...Our prayers for peace will turn to ashes in our mouths...
...Below, their seven-year-old daughter mixes more mud...
...Now I have four children, two boy and two daughter...
...almost no one in Israel is prepared to think in such terms...
...And the Americans, having accepted the' central ity of the Palestine question, can scarcely be expected to view with favor anything less than the kind of "fundamental rethinking" some Israelis are now N calling for, but few are yet engaging in...
...His wife climbs a ladder to the roof where he is working...
...The security officer decides to call his superior...
...My Hebrew is adequate to the task, his is somewhat better...
...My skepticism derives from conversations here in Cairo, where two things emerge rather clearly: first, whatever Sadat's private views, the Egyptian political elite does care about the Palestinians, and is not nearly so ready to scuttle the PLO— let alone the Palestinian people—as Sadat himself sometimes appears to be...
...A scenario, gloom amidst the euphoria: The Israelis, thinking that Sadat is, despite his disclaimers, prepared to conclude a separate peace, fail to take the bold steps the situation requires...
...It could not have meant the flowering of a national culture...
...It is less about politics than it is about psychology...
...Two Israelis, two Americans, four Jews come to pay homage...
...When in Sinai, Israel helicopter come and go like that" (indicating that he was wounded in the thigh) "and then after one hour, two hours maybe, come other people, Israeli people, for me, and take me to Khan Yunis, inside prison...
...This time they were, and I suppose that it is the events of the past weeks that have made them that way...
...That is why he went to such lengths, as he had, in fact, on earlier occasions, to invite Israel to insist on security commitments from any or all foreign powers...
...Good boy...
...No, Cairo is not like Manhattan, nor like the articles that try to tell about it, nor like anything I have ever known...
...I am happy that I do not have to file, that I can spend most of my time in town, meeting—or missing meetings—with government officials...
...I have already seen it, from my hotel window 10 miles away, a familiar shadow on the horizon...
...Naturally, the current Israeli claims to sovereignty over the West Bank are taken as still further evidence of imperialist intent...
...I like go Israel, my son go inside Israel, sightsee, not soldier...
...The familiarity disappears on Friday, when I watch a mule panting its way uphill, its owner-driver walking next to it, urging it on...
...Carter will be meeting with Sadat on Wednesday, and will undoubtedly urge him to keep the negotiations moving, not to permit a collapse so soon...
...The flags come down, all of them...
...They have never seen Dubai, for example...
...It is not only Begin...
...But he is dead wrong in his assessment of what the Arabs know about Israel, even though Israel is an open society, hence more easily knowable than most of the Arab states...
...Despite the recent proliferation of Israel studies and Hebrew studies in Egyptian universities, fundamental understanding is still lacking...
...Again, we shall have to try to help them understand who we are, and why we belong, and why the Syrian and Iraqi and Algerian and Egyptian Jews of Israel cannot and will not "come home...
...Sometimes, there is understanding...
...Without the statistics, it is not even a curiosity...
...In every office I visit, there seem to be a dozen extra people just hanging around...
...Pride and dignity, unexpected in a miserable place where bakshish is the norm...
...But I think the Israelis may underestimate Sadat's cleverness...
...Already, the dead mule and the one-room shack, the congestion and the rags, seem more like something I have read about, photographed, than seen, experienced...

Vol. 3 • January 1978 • No. 3


 
Developed by
Kanda Sofware
  Kanda Software, Inc.