Thirteen Days in September

by Lawrence Wright

  On the way he recalled the long debate that had taken place in the Knesset only a few days before to decide whether to agree to the treaty that Carter had put before them. Dayan was the last to speak in the debate. Typically, he shunned the high-flown rhetoric that infects conversations about peace. The treaty, he said, was not the fulfillment of Isaiah’s vision of swords beaten into plowshares. It was a military treaty containing clauses for the construction of air bases and guarantees for Israel’s security. It was also a political treaty, designed to establish relations between two neighboring countries long at war. It was an honest treaty, because it did not paper over the differences between them. And it was a realistic treaty, because it allowed Egypt to reconcile itself to the idea of Israel’s existence.

  TWO MONTHS LATER, Begin and Sadat met again at the town of El Arish, the administrative capital of Sinai, where the Israelis formally transferred the peninsula back to Egyptian control. The national anthems played and a bugle sounded as the Israeli flag was lowered and the Egyptian one raised in its place.

  A caravan of buses arrived from either direction, leaving long trails of dust in their wake. Begin had invited wounded soldiers from each side to meet in this desert oasis in an act of reconciliation. The veterans, about 150 of them altogether, disembarked in a painful display of war’s cruel toll. Blind, lame, disfigured, they hobbled or were guided past the honor guards and military bands. They sat across from each other on opposite sides of the hall where refreshments were served. There was an awkward silence, a standoff. The stress was so great that some of the broken warriors asked orderlies to take them out of the room. Begin’s speechwriter, Yehuda Avner, was sitting next to a blind Israeli veteran who had brought his son, who was eight or nine years old. “Kach oti eilehem,” he told the child: Take me to them. The boy was scared of the wounded men across the hall, but he guided his blind father to the middle of the room. An Egyptian veteran in a wheelchair rolled himself forward and took the Israeli’s hand. A few men clapped, then the room erupted in loud applause as the others came together and embraced.

  Amid cries of Shalom! Salaam! Sadat and Begin entered the room, greeting each of the disfigured veterans, asking them where they had fought and where they had been maimed. Avner noticed the child of the blind soldier, his face filled with fear and confusion. For as long as the boy could remember, he had been escorting his father, blinded by this very enemy. “Don’t be afraid, my son,” his father told him. “These Arabs are good.”

  When the two leaders returned to the uncomfortable military plane that had brought them to El Arish, Begin—always fastidious about his appearance—noticed that his shoes were dusty from the sand, so he took out a handkerchief and polished them. Then he offered the handkerchief to Sadat, who politely declined.

  THE EGYPTIAN GOVERNMENT built a parade ground to commemorate the 1973 war, when the country recaptured its pride by crossing the Suez Canal. Each year, on October 6, the anniversary of the start of the war, Sadat attired himself in splendid regalia and invited his top officials, foreign diplomats, and international correspondents to attend the annual celebration. In 1981, Sadat wore a field marshal’s uniform, which had just arrived a few days before from his tailor in London—jodhpurs with knee-high black boots, a cap with gold braid on the bill, and a blue-gray jacket, which he covered with the green Sash of Justice across his chest and the Star of Sinai medal at his neck. He decided not to wear his bulletproof vest.

  The “Hero of the Crossing,” as he liked to be called, sat in the first row of the large marble reviewing stand next to Vice President Mubarak. A thousand others gathered to watch, including the American and Israeli ambassadors and other dignitaries. Sadat’s wife, Jehan, and their grandchildren sat in a glassed-in box high above. There was a band and fireworks. The stately Camel Corps passed by, looking like a vintage postcard. Parachutists landed on targets only a few yards from the stand. Tanks and armored personnel carriers moved in practiced precision before the dutiful spectators. As a formation of French-made Mirage jets passed overhead, performing aerobatics and trailing streams of colored smoke, one of the troop trucks in the parade slammed to a halt and several soldiers leaped to the ground carrying automatic rifles and grenades. One of them, Khalid al-Islambouli, raced toward the reviewing stand. Sadat abruptly stood up and saluted.

  Perhaps he thought the young lieutenant and the others were paying tribute to him. He had brought peace to Egypt, after all. For eight years, the armed forces had been spared from combat. Egypt’s economy was still suffering, although boosted by the $2.1 billion, most of it in military aid, that the U.S. provided each year after Camp David. There was reason to imagine that Egyptians—and especially soldiers—would be grateful.

  Or perhaps he saw Death coming to collect him. The treaty with Israel had set loose the furies within radical Islam. One of Sadat’s first acts as president had been to release the political prisoners that Nasser had imprisoned, most of them members of the Muslim Brotherhood. Sadat had thought that this act of clemency, along with his own very conspicuous piety, would immunize him against the radicals, but they never trusted him to implement their demands—namely, the imposition of strict Islamic law and the mandatory covering of women. Sadat responded with a crackdown on student religious groups. During parliamentary elections, he banned discussion of the peace treaty; he made himself president for life and prime minister for good measure. He passed a law permitting women the right to divorce and banned the niqab—the face mask for women favored by Islamic fundamentalists—from the universities. In the summer of 1981, he jailed three thousand people, including the Supreme Guide of the Muslim Brothers and many political opponents, including everyone who had publicly criticized the Camp David agreement.

  Sadat ruled his people as an autocrat, as they had always been ruled. He explained to a leading Egyptian intellectual, Saad Eddin Ibrahim, that his critics misunderstood the Quran, which afforded special standing to the ruler of Egypt. When God sought to free the Children of Israel from their Egyptian bondage, he did not speak to the Egyptian people; instead, God advised Moses and Aaron to plead with the leader. “Go, both of you, to Pharaoh, for he has exceeded all bounds. Speak to him gently so that he may take heed, or show respect.” If Moses, one of the strongest prophets, was instructed to speak politely to Pharaoh, Sadat reasoned, certainly his intellectual critics should treat him with similar respect.

  Egypt, however, had turned against Sadat. It wasn’t just the radicals and the intellectuals. The peace he had given his people was not embraced. Peace did not bring the complete resolution that one seeks in war. The allure of conquest and rectification still cast a spell despite the thirty years of conflict that had brought so much misery, poverty, and humiliation. Whenever Egypt was bleeding, other Arab countries egged it on to greater and greater sacrifices, but now that it was at peace, the Arab nations imposed an economic boycott and barred Egyptian planes from their airspace. The Arab League, which was founded and headquartered in Cairo, expelled Egypt and moved its offices to Tunis. Every Arab country except Oman and Sudan severed diplomatic relations. The isolation that Mohamed Kamel had envisioned was a reality. Sadat lashed out at the “cowards and dwarfs” in the Arab world who shunned him. Their criticism of his peace with Israel was no more than “the hissing of snakes,” he said. “He was saying things that may be true, but weren’t necessary,” Carter later recalled. “I tried to get him to shut up.”

  Sadat responded to the furor, as usual, by turning inward, retreating from social contact. He had never cared much for food, but now he ate only soup and boiled vegetables. He often spoke of death. “It was as if he were set on some sort of divine mission that no one could interrupt,” Jehan Sadat observed.

  Sadat’s assassin responded to his salute by hurling a grenade, which failed to explode, then he and the other soldiers began firing their automatic weapons into the reviewing stand. The first shot hit Sadat in the neck. Islambouli boldly walked directly to the stands and fired into Sadat’s
body, emptying his magazine. For the first thirty seconds, the presidential bodyguards seemed to freeze in place. Sadat’s private secretary, Fawzi Abdel Hafez, tried to shield him with a chair, but Hafez was shot as well, absorbing more than twenty bullets (he somehow survived). By the time the shooting was over, Sadat and eleven others had been murdered. The Coptic bishop lay dead in his official robes. The Cuban ambassador was also dead. Twenty-eight people were wounded. The Belgian ambassador was shot twice. Blood cascaded down the steps of the reviewing stand. One of the assassins was killed and three others injured and then arrested. “I have killed the Pharaoh!” Islambouli crowed.

  Osama el-Baz, who was seated near Sadat when the attack began, disappeared. Mubarak refused to announce the president’s death until his closest aide could be found. It was hours later that Baz was discovered, walking the streets of the suburb of Heliopolis, many miles away, in a state of shock.

  The attack was supposed to have been the prelude to the takeover of the Egyptian government by the plotters, but that plan was thwarted by the dragnet that immediately followed, pulling in members of the numerous radical groups that had proliferated in the Islamist underground. A future leader of al-Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahiri, was snapped up on his way to the airport. He had conspired to bomb Sadat’s funeral, where many foreign leaders would be present, among them Jimmy Carter and Menachem Begin.

  SADAT’S FUNERAL WAS on Saturday, five days after his assassination. Because strictly observant Jews abjure using automobiles on the Sabbath, Begin chose to walk to the event from the nearby country club where he had found quarters. He was surrounded by Israeli security men, carrying automatic weapons inside attaché cases. Cairo was fortified and on edge. The leaders of eighty nations came to pay their respects, but Arab delegations were conspicuously absent. All over the city there were sandbagged gun emplacements in hotel lobbies and on apartment balconies. The whomp-whomp of low-flying helicopters reverberated in the streets. Soldiers in battle dress stood guard in every major intersection. The hysterical displays of grief that had overtaken Cairo when Nasser died were absent, however. Instead, there was massive indifference.

  Moshe Dayan was not present to say farewell to Sadat. He had resigned from the cabinet when he realized that Begin was avoiding implementing autonomy for the Palestinians. Convinced that the Israeli military occupation was destroying the moral fiber of Israel, Dayan had formed his own party, but gained only two seats in the Knesset. By then, the cancer that may have been plaguing him during Camp David had been detected. He immediately sensed that it was fatal. “I had an interesting life until the age of sixty-four,” he said with characteristic dispassion. He died six days after Sadat’s funeral.

  Ezer Weizman was also absent. He, too, had quit the cabinet because of the delay in the autonomy talks and the aggressive expansion of settlements in the West Bank. After tendering his resignation, Weizman furiously ripped a peace poster off the wall of the prime minister’s office. “No one here wants peace,” he shouted. Begin felt betrayed and refused to allow Weizman to be a part of the Israeli delegation to Sadat’s funeral, although no one in Israel had been closer to Sadat.

  The dignitaries gathered on the same parade ground where Sadat had been killed. The blood had been washed from the reviewing stand, but the bullet holes were still evident. Carter walked with the American delegation, which included former presidents Nixon and Ford. He, too, was now a former president. Any chance for reelection perished in the failed effort to rescue the hostages held in the American embassy in Tehran after the 1979 Iranian revolution.

  Carter and Begin did not talk.

  The monument to Sadat at the parade ground where he died bore the Quranic epitaph he had chosen for himself before his fateful trip to Jerusalem, in case he was assassinated by the Jews: “Do not think of those who have been killed in God’s way as dead. They are alive with their Lord, well provided for.” In the end, it was his own people who killed him.

  FREE OF CONCERN about an Egyptian response, Begin aggressively expanded settlements in the West Bank, and in short order bombed an Iraqi nuclear reactor near Baghdad and extended Israeli law to the Golan Heights. Then, in June 1982, he sent the Israeli army into Lebanon, in order to root out the Palestinian Liberation Organization. The country was home to 300,000 Palestinian refugees, who had tilted the demographic balance in a country that had once been dominated by pro-Western Maronite Christians.

  Begin acknowledged that it was a “war of choice,” unlike all of Israel’s previous conflicts, but he promised that the war would bring “forty years of peace” to Israel once the job had been done. The master plan, envisioned by Ariel Sharon, was to force the Palestinians out of Lebanon into Jordan, which would effectively turn that country into a Palestinian homeland and allow Israel to absorb the West Bank. Begin promised President Ronald Reagan that Israel would not need to go farther than forty kilometers from the border.

  Whatever limitations on the plan that the government had imposed were left aside as soon as Sharon moved his army into Lebanon. The Israelis conspired with a Christian warlord, Bashir Gemayel, of the Maronite Phalange party, to expel the Palestinians, defeat the Syrian forces in the country, and make Gemayel president of Lebanon. The Israeli army quickly accomplished those objectives. Yasser Arafat and the leaders of the PLO left Beirut on a ship bound for Tunisia. Gemayel became president of Lebanon that August. A month later he was blown to pieces by a Syrian bomb.

  Without a Lebanese partner to clean up the PLO machinery still left in place, the Israeli army then invaded West Beirut. “Two targets in particular seemed to interest Sharon’s army,” Thomas Friedman, then a young correspondent for The New York Times in Beirut, later wrote. One was an archive of old Palestine—books, land deeds, photographs of Arab life, and maps that marked every Arab village that stood before the State of Israel was created. Friedman observed the graffiti the Israeli soldiers left behind in the room where the archives had been kept. Palestinian? What’s that? And Palestinians, fuck you.

  The other targets were the two Palestinian refugee camps called Sabra and Shatila. Sharon contended that militants were still hiding there. His troops sealed off the camps and then let the Phalangists enter and take revenge for the death of their leader. Over the next three days they killed nearly everyone in the camps. The Israelis had a clear view of the slaughter from the rooftop of the Kuwaiti embassy, which they occupied. To assist the Phalangists in their work, the Israelis provided illuminating flares at night, and let them supervise their operation from the Israeli command post across the street. When the killers finally left, journalists and diplomats found among the mutilated corpses babies and toddlers who had been ripped apart and thrown into trash cans, boys who had been castrated, people who had been scalped and Christian crosses carved into their bodies. The Red Cross estimated the number of dead between eight hundred and one thousand. Other sources put the number of dead much higher, but because the Phalangists disposed of many of the bodies it is impossible to have an accurate count. Friedman saw no evidence that any of the victims strewn around the camps were PLO fighters; they had left before the camps were assaulted.

  The United Nations condemned it as an act of genocide. Shamed and outraged by the massacre and the miasma of the war, 400,000 Israelis—more than 10 percent of the country’s population—went into the streets to demand an accounting. The official inquiry that eventually followed held Sharon personally responsible for the atrocity, but Begin refused to fire him. (Sharon did resign as minister of defense but remained in the cabinet without portfolio.) The world began to take a serious interest in the Palestinian cause, and Egypt once again united with the Arabs in outrage.

  Begin had thought the war would last only forty-eight hours, with negligible casualties, but war makes its own calculations. According to the Lebanese government, more than thirty thousand Lebanese were killed during the Israeli invasion, most of them civilians. In the narrow ancient streets of Beirut, where much of the fighting took place, a fou
rth of the victims were under fifteen and a third were adults over fifty—children and grandparents. The Israeli Defense Ministry says that 1,217 Israeli soldiers died in the conflict. Even worse than the war was the legacy it left behind. Lebanon was already a dysfunctional country, but its fragile democracy was shattered and civil war reignited, destroying a society once noted for its arts, commerce, and lighthearted materialism. When Israeli forces finally began to withdraw, unilaterally, in 1985, the Syrian army that was supposed to have been defeated and expelled returned to assume its brutal management of a desolated country. The space that the PLO left in southern Lebanon was replaced by Hezbollah, which was created to oppose Israeli occupation. Israel finally completed its withdrawal from Lebanon in May 2000, eighteen years after the war began.

  Peace had given Begin a free hand, which he overplayed. The war in Lebanon, and the death of his beloved wife, Aliza, broke him. He grew frail, and stopped dying his hair. His mood alarmed everyone who knew him. Intimates shielded him from interviews and the public. On August 28, 1983, Begin was supposed to receive the new German chancellor, Helmut Kohl. One more thing that Begin couldn’t bear was to shake hands with a German. When Kadishai came into the prime minister’s office that morning, Begin told his old friend, “Today I will quit my job.” He explained to his cabinet that he was seeking “forgiveness, absolution, and atonement. Whether it will be granted to me, I do not know.”

  Afterward, Begin’s friend and cabinet secretary Dan Meridor demanded, “Menachem, why did you do it?” Begin listed his physical weakness, the lack of privacy, and the demonstrations that opponents of the war held across the street from his house around the clock. He couldn’t sleep for the noise they made. The protestors kept a sign with a running total of Israeli casualties every day. Begin couldn’t bring himself to look at it. The police had offered to sweep the protestors off the street but he insisted on their right to demonstrate.