Race was still the most dangerous subject to navigate in Georgia. Carter defined himself in the 1970 campaign as a populist and a friend of the workingman, appealing to the same constituency that Maddox and other demagogues in Georgia had cultivated. At times he signaled that he was close to Alabama governor George Wallace and other prominent segregationists, even borrowing Wallace’s slogan, “our kind of man,” to wink at the racists in the crowd. He went so far as to endorse Lester Maddox, who could not succeed himself and was running for lieutenant governor, calling him “the embodiment of the Democratic Party.” There was a photograph of Carter’s chief opponent in the Democratic primary, Carl Sanders, standing next to black members of the Atlanta Hawks basketball team (which he partly owned), who were pouring champagne over his head. Atlanta reporters said that staffers in the Carter campaign mailed leaflets with the photograph to white barbershops and churches around the state and even passed them out at Klan rallies. Although Carter himself was not linked to these activities, because he was a south Georgia peanut farmer, it was already assumed that he must be a racist and a plantation owner. “I am not a land baron,” Carter was finally forced to declare. “I do not have slaves on my farm in Plains.”
One of Carter’s main supporters was a wealthy Iranian Jew from Savannah named David Rabhan. He had a shaky business empire that ranged from catfish farms to nursing homes. Tall and muscular, with a shaved head, and typically attired in a blue jumpsuit and sneakers, Rabhan was an author, sculptor, and gourmet cook. He was also a pilot, and during the campaign he flew Carter back and forth across the state in his twin-engine Cessna. They spent so much time together in the air that Carter learned to fly the plane while Rabhan napped.
Rabhan was a liberal, especially on race. He had been marked as a child by seeing the body of a black man who had been murdered by whites; as an adult, he cultivated friendships with some of the most important figures in Atlanta’s influential black community. He quietly introduced Carter to this crowd, along with black preachers and funeral directors throughout the state. Those meetings were kept secret so they would not destroy Carter’s chances. Black voters in the know were able to imagine that Carter was a closet progressive, in the same way that white racists assumed that he was one of them.
On one of the final days of the campaign, as the two men were flying from the Georgia coast across the state, Carter took the controls as Rabhan closed his eyes. They were flying at eight thousand feet when both engines sputtered and died. Carter panicked. He punched Rabhan, who didn’t stir. Then he hit him hard. “What’s the matter?” Rabhan asked.
“We’re out of gas!”
In that case, Rabhan said, they were going to crash.
Rabhan let that sink in, then he turned a valve and opened up the spare gas tank. The engines coughed back to life.
Very few people get away with teasing Jimmy Carter.
After Carter cooled off, he observed that Rabhan had done so much for him. “This is the end of the campaign,” he said. “I think I’ve got a good chance to win. Is there anything I can do for you?”
“No, I don’t need your help as governor,” Rabhan replied. “What I’d like you to do is tell the Georgia people what you think about the millstone of racism that has oppressed our state.”
Carter picked up an old flight map. On the back he wrote, “I know this state as well as anyone. I say to you quite frankly that the time for racial discrimination is over.” He handed it to Rabhan. “If I’m elected, in my inaugural speech I will make this statement.”
“Sign it,” Rabhan demanded.
That declaration from the Georgia governor’s mansion on January 12, 1971, put Carter on the cover of Time magazine and planted the seed of his presidential candidacy.
THE AMERICAN INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY had scarcely noticed Anwar Sadat in his early political career. Then, he was obscured by the giant shadow of Gamal Abdel Nasser, the charismatic architect of the Egyptian revolution. When Nasser died of a heart attack in 1970, Vice President Sadat was universally seen as a placeholder until the next strongman pushed him aside. Instead, he proved to be a master of the unexpected. First, he stunned Egypt by rounding up Nasser’s corrupt cronies, who controlled the main positions of government power, and throwing them in jail. In 1972, he expelled fifteen thousand Soviet troops and military advisers from Egypt. Until that point, Egypt had been essentially a Soviet military base, Russia’s main foothold in the Middle East. There was as much puzzlement as joy in Washington, which had been caught by complete surprise. The Israelis were convinced that without the Russians the Egyptians were incapable of waging war. The very next year, on Yom Kippur, Sadat sent his army across the Suez Canal, catching the Israelis off guard and bringing the superpowers to the point of a nuclear showdown. By then, the mercurial Egyptian leader had become an object of obsession among American policy makers and intelligence analysts.
With all the surprises that Sadat had pulled out of his hat, none equaled the moment, on November 9, 1977, when he set aside the prepared text of a long-winded speech he was making to the Egyptian People’s Assembly and announced, “I am ready to travel to the ends of the earth if this will in any way protect an Egyptian boy, soldier, or officer from being killed or wounded.… Israel will be surprised to hear me say that I am willing to go to their parliament, the Knesset itself, and debate with them.” Few believed it. The Egyptian parliamentarians routinely cheered; even Yasser Arafat, the head of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, who was present as a guest, dutifully applauded. Cairo newspapers omitted the statement the next morning. Everyone thought it was an empty gesture.
Ten days later Sadat’s plane took off for Ben Gurion Airport. He now held the world spellbound. Israel was in a state of confused delirium because of the visit, the first in Israel’s history by any Arab leader. Ten thousand soldiers, police, and security personnel were waiting to guard the Egyptian president, in addition to the 2,500 foreign journalists who had rushed to cover the historic event. At eight thirty p.m., two hours after the end of Shabbat, searchlights picked up the white plane against the black sky, flying low and circling over Tel Aviv. Egyptian flags of red, white, and black intermingled with the blue and white of Israel, even though the two countries were still in a state of war. Without sheet music for the Egyptian national anthem, the Israeli military orchestra had learned how to play it by listening to Cairo radio. Sharpshooters were stationed on the rooftops of the terminal buildings in case terrorists suddenly emerged from the presidential plane rather than Sadat himself. But then there he was.
Anwar Sadat being greeted by Menachem Begin upon arrival in Jerusalem, 1977
Sadat’s enemies were waiting on the tarmac, and he walked among them, joking with the generals and the cabinet officers, greeting Menachem Begin and former Israeli leaders.
“Madame, I’ve waited a long time to meet you,” Sadat said as he kissed Golda Meir.
“We’ve been expecting you,” she said.
“And now I’m here.”
He joked with Ariel Sharon, perhaps the greatest field commander in Israel’s history, saying that the next time he crossed the canal he would have him arrested. “Oh, no, sir,” Sharon replied. “Now I’m just the minister of agriculture.”
By presenting himself to Israel, Sadat was introducing two cultures that were almost entirely unknown to one another. Few Israelis had ever met an Egyptian, except for the Jews who had emigrated from there, so the shock of having Sadat himself in their midst was compounded by curiosity and wonder. The same was true for the Egyptians watching the event on television. To see Sadat staring into the faces of the enemy—until now, figures of legend—suddenly and unsettlingly humanized the Israelis in the Egyptian mind. Sadat was convinced that 70 percent of the conflict between Israel and the Arabs was psychological; if he could make peace seem real and available, not only to the Israelis but also to the Arabs, most of the work would be done. Then, perhaps, there would be a chance for the prosperity that Egyptians despera
tely needed but which wars had chronically destroyed.
Sadat’s decision to go to Israel shattered the taboo against speaking to Israelis or even acknowledging the existence of a Jewish homeland. Both the foreign minister and the man Sadat had appointed to succeed him had resigned, protesting that Egypt would now be isolated in the Arab world. Sadat compounded the insult by timing his arrival for the eve of Eid al-Adha, one of the main holy days in Islam. On that day, the king of Saudi Arabia goes to unlock the door of the Kaaba, the cubical stone building in Mecca where all Muslims direct their prayers. “I have always before gone to the Kaaba to pray for somebody, never to pray against anyone,” King Khalid said. “But on this occasion I found myself saying, ‘Oh God, grant that the airplane taking Sadat to Jerusalem may crash before it gets there, so that he may not become a scandal for all of us.’ ”
As the presidential motorcade climbed through the rocky hillsides toward Jerusalem, crowds along the highway sang “Hevenu Shalom Aleikhem” (“We’ve Brought Peace upon You”). The Israelis had no armored limousine for Sadat, so they had borrowed one from the American ambassador. All along the way people were openly weeping. Some wore T-shirts saying “All You Need Is Love.” The Egyptian entourage gaped at the scene; it was like being on another planet. The motorcade came to a halt at Jerusalem’s King David Hotel, which Begin’s irregulars had blown up during the British Mandate three decades before. A crowd of 250 people waited in the lobby crying out to Sadat. Across the street, the carillon at the YMCA played “Getting to Know You.”
JERUSALEM—the most contested piece of property in history—was the object of longing and worship for the three great Abrahamic religions and the source of centuries of bloodshed. Israel had seized East Jerusalem ten years before in the 1967 war, thrilling Christians and Jews all over the world and throwing Muslims into despair. Now, from their rooms at the King David, the Egyptian delegation had a magnificent view of the honeyed limestone walls of the Old City and the building cranes that rose like a giant forest around it. “All that construction!” one of the delegates said. “I fear that Jerusalem is lost to the Arabs.” Although Sadat himself seemed serenely untouched, the intermixed feelings of anxiety, hope, and dread among the Egyptians led to great stress and confusion. One of Sadat’s bodyguards actually died of a heart attack in the hotel. His corpse was smuggled into a cargo plane to keep rumors of assassination from taking root.
At the heart of the Old City stands the Temple Mount. According to Jewish tradition, it is where Adam was made from its dust, where Cain killed Abel, and where God’s spirit dwells. King Solomon was said to have built the First Temple on this spot a thousand years before the birth of Jesus in order to house the Ark of the Covenant, which contained the stone tablets with the Ten Commandments that God gave to Moses on Mount Sinai. The First Temple stood until 586 BCE, when the Babylonian ruler Nebuchadnezzar tore it down and herded the Jews into Babylon. Seventy years later the Jews were freed by the Persian ruler Cyrus the Great, and the Second Temple was established on the same spot. King Herod expanded it into one of the largest structures in the ancient world. It was here that Jesus drove out the money changers and the sellers of animals for sacrifice, saying, “Take these out of here, and stop making my Father’s house a marketplace.” The temple was sacked once again in 70 CE, by the Romans, following the Jewish revolt against the empire.
In 1099, the Crusaders arrived in Jerusalem and killed everybody in town. Jews were rounded up and slaughtered in their synagogues. One witness describes Christian knights riding through a lake of blood after slaying ten thousand Muslims who had taken refuge on the Temple Mount. Control of the city passed back and forth between Christians and Muslims until the twelfth century, when Saladin peacefully recaptured the city and allowed each religion the right to worship in its holy places—an example that would prove difficult for his successors to follow. The Ottomans seized Jerusalem in 1517, and maintained control for four hundred years, until the British expelled the Turks and their German advisers at the end of the First World War. By that time, Jerusalem had been reduced to a pestilential town of 55,000 starving souls, overrun with prostitutes and venereal diseases. Conscious of the precedent, the victorious general, Sir Edmund Allenby, entered the city on foot, rather than in a martial display. As he received the keys to the city, Allenby declared, “The Crusades have now ended.” But even then, the British and the French were carving up the Ottoman Empire among themselves. At this imperial feast, the Zionist campaign in Europe succeeded in getting the support of the British to gain a homeland for the Jews in Palestine. A bloody new era was born.
Muslims call the Temple Mount Haram al-Sharif, the Noble Sanctuary. According to the Quran, this is where Abraham demonstrated his faithfulness to God by offering up his son Ishmael. (Christians and Jews believe that Abraham’s son Isaac, father of the Jews, was the intended sacrificial victim.) Two mosques now stand atop the mount where the Jewish temples once had been.
The day after Sadat arrived in Jerusalem was the feast of Eid al-Adha, which commemorates God’s mercy in sparing Isaac. Stalked by television cameras and helicopters, Sadat entered the silver-domed Al-Aqsa Mosque for dawn prayers. His presence in this sacred space sent electrifying currents throughout the Muslim world, alternately of hope and betrayal. On the one hand, the loss of Jerusalem was symbolically greater than that of Sinai and the entire West Bank, and the fact that the city’s future was once again on the bargaining table was almost unbearably thrilling; on the other hand, the mere fact that Sadat was dealing with the occupiers stoked fear and paranoia. This was the same mosque where, in 1951, a Palestinian tailor assassinated King Abdullah I of Jordan because he had dared to negotiate with the Israelis. The bullet holes were still visible in the alabaster columns. As Sadat worshipped, Palestinian protesters outside the mosque loudly denounced him for the same crime.
Sadat moved on to the seventh-century Dome of the Rock, the oldest building in Islam, a magnificent eight-sided structure with ornate porcelain mosaics and a golden cupola that dominates the Old City. It is a resonant icon of Islamic spirituality as well as the ubiquitous political emblem of the Palestinians’ yearning for restitution. The shrine encloses the rocky outcropping that is the summit of the Temple Mount. According to Jewish tradition, the stone is the perch that God made for himself when he created the universe. Muslims believe that the Prophet Muhammad made his night journey to heaven atop his steed, al-Buraq, from this rock. At the End of Days, according to Islamic tradition, the Final Judgment will take place in this sanctuary, with the blessed and the damned going their separate ways for eternity.
Sadat made his way into the Old City at the base of the Temple Mount, stopping at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. A monk showed him the stone where the body of the crucified Jesus was said to have been washed and the tomb where he was buried. Outside, demonstrators were beginning to break through the ranks of security. “Sadat, what do you want from us?” Palestinians cried as he left. “We are against you. We don’t want you here.”
Afterward, Sadat laid a wreath at a memorial for Israeli soldiers killed in all the wars since the founding of the state. Then he joined Begin at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial. Sadat was handed a skullcap. “It’s a kippah,” Begin explained. “It’s our custom to cover our heads during prayers or when entering a house of prayer.”
Sadat silently moved through the somber memorial, with the tools of genocide starkly displayed. There was the gate to Auschwitz, with its grotesquely ironic motto, Arbeit macht frei (Work makes you free), through which more than a million Jews passed on their way to death. The Hall of Names contained brief biographies of two million of the six million Jews who perished in the Holocaust. In the middle of the room there was a great cone lined with images of the victims; it rose skyward like the smokestacks of the death camps. “All this befell us because we had no state of our own,” Begin told Sadat.
Begin’s own parents, Ze’ev Dov and Chasia, as well as his older brother, Herzl, were
among the names in this grim repository. On July 22, 1942, the Nazis captured his hometown of Brisk2 and began their systematic annihilation of all Polish Jews. Ze’ev Dov had been attempting to emigrate to Palestine when the Nazis arrived, but Chasia was in the hospital with pneumonia. The Germans murdered her in her bed, along with the other patients. Five thousand Jews from Brisk, including Ze’ev Dov and Herzl, were rounded up. Some were shot and thrown into a pit; Ze’ev Dov was weighted down with rocks and drowned in the River Bug. Menachem learned that his father’s final words were to curse his executioners: “A day of retribution will come upon you too!”
“May God guide our steps toward peace,” Sadat wrote in the guest book. “Let us put an end to all the suffering for mankind.”
SADAT, master of the bold gesture, was indifferent to trifling details, but his confounded Israeli hosts were obsessed with the fine print. What did Sadat want in exchange for this stunning overture? Did he expect Sinai? Some concession on the West Bank or Gaza? They kept trying to pin Sadat down, but he was maddeningly evasive. “We have to concentrate on the heart of the issue, not on technicalities and formalities,” he declared. He wanted to arrive at an “agreed program”—a statement of principles in which Israel would pledge to withdraw from the occupied territories and come to a solution on the Palestinian question. But exactly what did that mean? All the occupied territories, or was that negotiable? What “solution” was there to the plight of the Palestinians? “Every side wants to deal with details,” Begin insisted, “not only general declarations.” The Israelis were so busy trying to read the nuances of Sadat’s language that they were blind to the fact that Sadat’s presence in Jerusalem was the message itself.
Thirteen Days in September Page 3