Arriving back in Israel to torrential rains late Wednesday night, January 16, I met with Eban, Dinitz, and Evron for a briefing from midnight to 2:00 A.M. My staff and I spent some hours collating all the documents. And we drafted a statement for Nixon to make announcing the successful completion of the negotiation. Afterward — early Thursday morning — I called Haig and gave him the hopeful news that Nixon might be able to go on television by the end of the day.
After four hours of sleep, we awoke to snow. The temperature had fallen sharply; the storm had turned into the first blizzard in Jerusalem in several decades. All movement in Jerusalem stopped. I could gaze out the window of my sixth-floor suite in the King David Hotel and see the stone buildings and wall of the Old City of Jerusalem with the Mount of Olives behind in an eerie white blanket against a gray horizon. It was a spectacular scene, one of utter peace.
My reveries were interrupted by reality. My appointment with Golda had to be canceled because there was no way to get to her residence. I hated to think how Aswan, which had never seen a blizzard, would react to a delay allegedly caused by inability to move about in Israel’s seat of government. Dayan came to the rescue. He produced jeeps and personnel carriers to bring the Israeli negotiating team to my suite at the hotel, where we met at 9:30 A.M. AS always in the final phase of a negotiation, issues that earlier would not have taken five minutes had to carry the weight of the final calibration. By noon we had in effect agreed that I would ask Sadat by telegram to accept the thirty-kilometer limit for surface-to-air missiles (which I knew he would do). The Israeli negotiating team meanwhile would put before the cabinet for final approval the Egyptian requirement that thirty tanks and six batteries of howitzers remain on the east bank of the Canal. Dayan came up with an imaginative idea to meet Sadat’s concern that the arms limits not leak before signature and that any leak afterward should preferably come from a secret session of the Israeli Parliament. Secret sessions of the Parliament being unknown, it was agreed that the terms be conveyed to a secret session of the Defense and Foreign Affairs Committee. (They leaked anyway. Why Sadat preferred this procedure he did not divulge to me. Perhaps he felt the fact of a secret session would demonstrate that Israel was aware of the sensibilities of Egypt’s armed forces.) At noon we were finished. “It is a good agreement,” I said.
“It is not a bad agreement,” said Allon.
“ ‘Not bad’ is Hebrew for ‘good,’ ” explained Eban the diplomat.
At 12:35 P.M. I left for the Prime Minister’s residence in an Israeli army vehicle, slithering through the twelve-inch snowfall. She needed to hear from me personally what I had told the negotiating team, because I had learned that despite her illness she would personally chair the cabinet meeting called to approve the agreement. It was reassuring news. I was confident that this guaranteed success; she would be as fierce in fighting for the agreement as she had been steadfast in defending her country’s interests. I read her Sadat’s personal message. “It is a good thing,” she said laconically. “Why is he doing this?” After a generation of conflict it was not easy to believe in the sincerity of the adversary — especially one who had initiated the process in which we were engaged with a surprise attack.
There was now nothing to do but wait. With Golda in the chair, the principal uncertainty was that her colleagues might be jockeying for a position in the new cabinet that was expected to be formed after the Parliament met in four days. Despite what we knew rationally, my colleagues and I were jumpy and afraid of some unforeseeable snag. I telephoned Fahmy — via Washington — that Israel needed another cabinet session but that I hoped to have a positive answer by 5:00 P.M. local time. In this mood of tense expectancy, I paid a courtesy call on Israel’s President Ephraim Katzir, a distinguished scientist.
Then at 3:55 P.M. Eban, Dinitz, and Evron came to my hotel suite with good news:
EBAN: The Cabinet has approved the agreement. We will make a statement.
KISSINGER: You will say that you approve the stage of negotiations as they are now, subject to technical clarifications.
EVRON: They have issued a statement that the government unanimously authorized the Prime Minister to notify the Secretary of State of its decision, but there are a few technical points. I hope they don’t get too nervous in Cairo.
KISSINGER: They will get very nervous!
But the technical points were all solvable or indeed already solved. Dinitz ordered champagne and Eban toasted the agreement in the wistful Israeli fashion, coupling mutual congratulations with a plea for assurance:
EBAN: We should toast the agreement. And to a peace agreement.
KISSINGER: This at least opens the possibility of a new relationship with Egypt.
EBAN: You said it could be a turning point.
KISSINGER: Yes, it could be.
Ambassador Eilts and Hal Saunders, who had stayed behind in Egypt, had meanwhile collated the final documents for Sadat. At 7:00 P.M. we learned that Sadat had initialed the “United States proposal” on force limits. (“Initialed” is a technical diplomatic term indicating that the text of the agreement is frozen pending signature. It says in effect: “If I sign anything, it will be this text.”) Sisco and I had another glass of champagne.
At 9:00 P.M. Jerusalem time (3:00 P.M. in Washington), a proud President Nixon stepped before the press corps with the following announcement, the text of which had been previously approved by Egypt and Israel:
In accordance with the decision of the Geneva Conference, the Governments of Egypt and Israel, with the assistance of the Government of the United States, have reached agreement on the disengagement and separation of their military forces. The agreement is scheduled to be signed by the Chiefs of Staff of Egypt and Israel at noon Egypt-Israel time, Friday, January 18, at Kilometer 101 on the Cairo-Suez Road. The Commander of the United Nations Emergency Force, General Siilasvuo, has been asked by the parties to witness the signing.
The Final Phase
THE elation accompanying the end of the negotiation was quickly overwhelmed by the minutiae required for its consummation. The American negotiating team had assumed responsibility for producing the official text for the signing ceremony.V It was retyped to accommodate the last exchanges and State Department Legal Adviser Carlyle E. Maw was dispatched to attend the signing. This distinguished seventy-year-old pillar of the New York Bar was bundled in the open cab of an Israeli half-track outside the King David Hotel to make his way through the snowstorm to Tel Aviv, whence an Israeli plane took him to Cyprus. He was picked up there by an Egyptian plane and taken to Kilometer 101 by staff car the next morning. Hal Saunders would join him there.
Egyptian-Israeli Disengagement Agreement, January 18, 1974 (see text of the Agreement, pages 1250–1251)
The “United States proposal” defining the limitations of armament behind both lines was included in letters from Nixon to Golda Meir and Sadat; signature of the proposal constituted acceptance of the scheme.VI Then there were a number of Presidential letters to both sides containing assurances or statements of intention regarding such matters as passage through waterways and rebuilding of the Canal cities. Instructions were drafted for our ambassadors, Keating in Israel and Eilts in Egypt, on how to put the agreements into effect.
Nothing can culminate in Washington without extensive briefings. And when the news is good there is nothing the Administration is more eager to do. It forced my exhausted staff into drafting another batch of cables with detailed guidance. Brent Scowcroft was to brief key Congressional leaders before the announcement; he was also to bring Dobrynin up to date and hand him a text of the basic agreement. He had also to brief our principal NATO allies and the Chinese. There were many papers to be drafted, against a short time limit. But the tension had disappeared; it was joyful work.
There were congratulatory phone calls from President Nixon — and from Vice President Ford. (The elated Nixon also telephoned Sadat and Mrs. Meir.) Near midnight I briefed the journalists who had accompan
ied me in an atmosphere buoyant on all sides. With all their professional cynicism, they derived no little satisfaction from participating in what they considered an historic event that reflected well on their country.
Early Friday morning I journeyed once more through the snowbound streets of Jerusalem to call on the ailing Prime Minister and to collect her signature on the “United States proposal.” I had always felt a deep tenderness toward her. She had held her country together in dire crisis, at times defied its only friend. She had been converted only reluctantly to a negotiating process against which all her instincts rebelled. But she had known when to conclude an agreement with a dignity and self-confidence that demonstrated that Israel remained in control of its destiny in peace as in war. Before cameras Golda signed the document on force limitations. Privately, she gave me a friendly written reply to Sadat’s message of two days earlier. The relief, even exaltation, of the moment was reflected in the statements made to the press corps nearly suffocating in Golda’s small living room. For me it was one of those occasions that made the exhausting labors of diplomacy worthwhile. After months of sometimes tense controversies Golda exuded relief; the prickly exterior for a moment gave way and revealed her people’s longing for, indeed obsession with, peace:
Mr. Secretary, I think that not only those of us who are here take cognizance of this day as a great date, a day which I am hopeful is the beginning, and in its wake will come the day when there will be peace in the Middle East, peace for Israel and its neighbors, and I hope that this is the beginning of a process which will lead to permanent peace between Egypt and Israel.
I don’t think it will make news if I would say that you, Mr. Secretary, had something to do with it. We don’t like to use words which may sound like only words. But I sincerely and honestly believe that you have made history this week. I know you didn’t begin it this week but there’s no doubt in my mind. I want to tell you, on behalf of the people of Israel, how much we appreciate it.
I want to tell the President of the United States that his policy of understanding the problems in the Middle East, understanding the problems of Israel, and its neighbors, has certainly led to this day. And our appreciation of what he has done, of his attitude and his efforts, are remembered by Israel and its people.
There will be many, many mothers and young wives and children in Israel in the next few days, when they will see their dear ones, who for many months have been on the front watching over the security and safety of Israel and they will be very happy. We hope to see the day, and I honestly and sincerely believe, the day when armies will become something of the past.
And I want to express my thanks for your patience. Wisdom is something either given to one or not; you’re either born with it or not, and for that you deserve no special credit. But for your patience, your work, your patience with both sides. We were easy [laughter] but maybe you had problems with the other side.
Public words of approbation from an Israeli leader were a precious rarity, dealt out sparingly, like a nation’s highest decoration. I replied:
No people have suffered more for the past generation than the people of Israel. No people have more cause to wish for peace than the people of Israel. And therefore this day, which we hope will be important for all the peoples of the world, must be a particularly poignant day for this country, which in all of its history has never known what other nations take for granted, a period of acceptance and period of peace.
All of us who have had the privilege of working with you, Madame Prime Minister, and with your colleagues, will try to go on from here to make sure that what happens today is not going to be an interlude but will be remembered as the date that peace came to an area from which so many great things have come to the world, so that the talents and energy of all of its peoples can be devoted to paths of construction. We leave you here today and hope to work with you in what we know will remain a common effort.
My problem now was to get to Aswan to collect Sadat’s signature on the same American proposal. The official signing of the basic agreement was set for midday at Kilometer 101. If I arrived in Aswan too late, it would be, as I said to Eban, a “not uninteresting situation,” with the basic disengagement agreement signed — in effect beyond recall — but not the American force-limits proposal containing all the relevant details.
Getting to Aswan, or at least leaving Jerusalem, proved to be far from simple. The snow blocking the road to the airport, our resourceful hosts came up with the idea of going by train. (Mercifully, they did not subject me to a wintry helicopter ride.) I had not known that a railway existed between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv; it proved to be knowledge not worth having. The railway cars dated back to Turkish times, or so the erudite Eban claimed. If they were of more recent vintage, they had been strenuously used. But as we were bounding through the snow-covered Judean hills, it seemed an appropriately surrealistic ending to three months of frantic diplomacy.
History is a tale of battles; of victories and defeats; of the triumph of will — all suggesting that one side’s celebration is the other side’s despair. Rare are the moments of triumph in which there are no losers. So Eban and I talked, over the rattle of the train in the otherwise totally still landscape that had seen so much of man’s cruelty as well as of his transcendent aspirations. What impact would peace have on the soul of a country that had wrested its identity from a struggle? Would the Arab nations ever genuinely accept the reality of peace with Israel? Could either side overcome its memories and fears? They were the key questions for the Foreign Minister of a country in which Jews mingled with Arabs, and which yet needed a visitor from 6,000 miles away to explain the psychology of Arab nations that, as far as Israel was concerned, might as well have been located on the far side of the moon. Was Sadat pursuing a devious tactic to accomplish traditional aims, or an historic turn? I thought the latter, but no one could be sure and the Egyptian President could not bind his successors. Was Israel gaining acceptance by its retreat, or starting a process of progressively weakening itself? None of the current actors would be around when the answer became evident. The fact was that Israel had no choice; it could not risk not making the experiment, for the Jewish state would consume its moral substance if it sought to rest its existence on naked force.
That morning, at any rate, second thoughts were submerged in hope. The Jerusalem Post had printed a cartoon of me as an angel of peace. It was a reflection more of the dreams of a people that had never known a day of formal peace than of my merit. For the length of the train ride, Eban and I abandoned ourselves to happy reminiscence of what deep down we knew would be later remembered — if we were lucky — as the easiest step of a long journey.
And so we boarded the shuttle to Aswan for the last time at 10:30 A.M. on Friday, January 18. However, what we were learning of Soviet conduct was well calculated to quell any euphoria. All week long we had heard that the Soviets were bitter, especially toward Cairo, for being shut out of the diplomacy; that they believed we had paralyzed the Geneva Conference in order to promote our unilateral role. There were indications that they were spreading the word that a role for Moscow in the talks would have strengthened Cairo’s position and they were denigrating disengagement as a victory for Israel. There was the implication that Moscow would not moderate Syria’s position as long as the USSR was excluded from negotiations.
In parallel, according to Brent Scowcroft, Brezhnev had sent a message to Nixon complaining that the understanding
on active participation of Soviet and American representatives in the discussion in Geneva together with Arab and Israeli delegates of the key issues of the Middle East settlement is actually not being implemented. The question is, in particular, of participation of representatives of the USSR and the US in the consideration of disengagement of troops.
Brezhnev proposed a meeting between Gromyko and me on February 7–8 in Geneva to analyze
everything that has happened since the cease-fire in the Middle East from the point
of view of our agreement with you to coordinate the efforts of both countries towards peaceful settlement in this region.
The Soviet complaints to Egypt and the Brezhnev letter starkly brought home to us what would have happened had we gone the Geneva route. Moscow would have taken extreme positions beyond what we could support, pressuring Arab governments that could not afford to seem less Arab than their Soviet spokesman and attempting to force Sadat to dissociate from us. Therefore I had no intention of jeopardizing the disengagement process by raising the specter of a Soviet-American condominium while Egyptian and Israeli armies were moving to new lines and Syria was considering whether or not to join in. One of the arts of diplomacy is to clothe a rejection in the form of an acceptance in principle. In this case I acceded to Soviet wishes by agreeing to a meeting but at a level not suited to political exploitation. I instructed Scowcroft to tell Dobrynin
that the President will want to discuss the Brezhnev messages with me personally upon my return. I will then be in touch with Dobrynin.
You should also tell him that, in the meantime, Ambassador Bunker will be arriving in Geneva on Monday where he will meet with Vinogradov for a preliminary review of the situation and my trip through the Middle East.
Bunker was instructed to avoid dramatics, which meant that he had only to act naturally. His occasional and empty meetings with Sergei Vinogradov, his Soviet counterpart as permanent representative to Geneva, were all that was left of the Geneva Conference.
I arrived in Aswan at 12:45 P.M. and sped to Sadat’s rest house. “Welcome, Henry,” he greeted me by the gazebo in the garden so that the photographers could take pictures; his use of my first name was new. He took me to his study where he signed the “United States proposal” on arms limits without another word. I then handed him Golda’s private letter, which read:
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