Years of Upheaval

by Henry Kissinger

  I am deeply conscious of the significance of a message received by the Prime Minister of Israel from the President of Egypt.

  It is indeed a source of great satisfaction to me and I sincerely hope that these contacts between us through Dr. Kissinger will continue, and prove to be an important turning point in our relations.

  I, for my part, will do my best to establish trust and understanding between us.

  Both our peoples need and deserve peace. It is my strongest conviction that peace is the goal toward which we must direct all our energies.

  Let me reiterate what you said in your message: “When I talk of permanent peace, between us, I mean it.”

  It is indeed extremely fortunate that we have Dr. Kissinger whom we both trust and who is prepared to give of his wisdom and talents in the cause of peace. I know that he will continue to extend this untiring service to the promotion of our common interest.

  There followed a scene out of a sentimental motion picture. Sadat had finished reading the letter, folded it, and taken off his glasses when his assistant Ashraf Marwan came into the room and whispered something in his ear. Sadat rose and walked over to me and kissed me on both cheeks: “They have just signed the agreement at Kilometer 101,” he said. And then he added: “I am today taking off my military uniform — I never expect to wear it again except for ceremonial occasions. Tell her [Golda] that is the answer to her letter.”

  And with that, we resumed our conversation in a matter-of-fact way as if nothing unusual had happened. He would leave for Syria shortly to explain the agreement and to be able to “guarantee” good Syrian behavior if it participated in the next phase of disengagement talks. He also expected the oil embargo to be lifted within the next week. Alas, Sadat’s judgment of the reaction of his Arab colleagues was not as acute as his perception of American psychology and the road to peace. Both predictions, as we shall see, proved overoptimistic.

  Sadat proceeded to carry out his promise that there would be no pressure for additional Israeli withdrawals while this disengagement was being implemented. To avoid any Soviet temptations to make trouble by putting forward unacceptable schemes, he would pull the Egyptian Ambassador out of the Geneva Conference during the next week. We could inform Israel that he expected to carry out a substantial demobilization by the end of February. (Israel would soon reciprocate.) He had arranged for me to spend the night in Luxor, so I could enjoy some rest before what he knew would be a difficult visit for me in Syria. And with this Sadat escorted me to my limousine. He placed his hands on my shoulders and said in his deep voice, in front of the press corps: “Mr. Secretary, you are not only my friend; you are also my brother.” And then the President of Egypt kissed me on both cheeks — this time for the television cameras.

  Luxor in ancient times had been Thebes, capital of Upper Egypt and monument to its glory. “Thebes,” the French Egyptologist Jean François Champollion, gazing awestruck at its spectacular ruins, is reported to have said, “is the greatest word in any language.” In the afternoon we toured the ruins of the Temple of Luxor, on the banks of the Nile, out-of-scale testimony to man’s quest for immortality, into a corner of which the largest cathedral would fit and whose central axis seems to stretch into infinity to symbolize the Egyptian sense of eternity. Wherever we walked, cheering crowds expressed the relief of the Egyptian people that the war had ended. It was an earnest of Egypt’s dedication to peace, like the courage and eloquence of its President.

  After night fell we were driven through the still blacked-out streets to a spot in utter darkness. Suddenly a light switch was thrown; Sadat had ended the blackout on the night of the disengagement agreement as he had always said he would. Before us was the avenue of the ram-headed sphinxes leading to the huge pylons that marked the entrance of the Temple of Karnak — the spectacular city of the “king of gods,” Amon, where 80,000 priests had worshipped the deities of ancient Egypt until the sands of time ran out on even that most enduring of civilizations. A literary, perhaps slightly melodramatic, “sound and light” presentation illuminated the monumental statues, columns, gateways, and obelisks over an area so vast that they could not be encompassed in a single view; they required four different vistas for even a partial comprehension. At one point, while a single obelisk was illuminated, there was read a papyrus from an Egyptian queen who lived nearly four thousand years ago. She had wanted to erect a golden obelisk to perpetuate her memory; but her advisers had thwarted her. She had to content herself with stone. Whether the story was apocryphal or true, it was a poignant illustration of the relativity of the concept of glory. The queen achieved permanence because her quest for the spectacular and the personal had been frustrated; a golden obelisk would long since have fallen prey to the greed of one of the conquerors who swept over the ancient capital in the course of the millennia. What had prevented the long-dead queen from gratifying her ego had guaranteed her immortality. What would be left of our work in a decade? And would we be better judges than that ancient queen of what was permanent and what ephemeral?

  Aqaba, Damascus, and Tel Aviv

  AFTER a week of dramatic exertions, all that followed was bound to be anticlimax. But though we were emotionally exhausted we needed to stop in Jordan to demonstrate that King Hussein, that moderate ruler and old friend, would not suffer for his refusal to pressure us. In the short term, it was even more imperative to engage Syria. If Sadat was to be preserved as a moderating force in the Arab world, his disengagement agreement must not stand alone, hence vulnerable. Everybody, including Israel, had an interest in encouraging Asad to proceed; it would open the prospect for a more hopeful future.

  Hussein had invited me to visit him in Aqaba, a resort on Jordan’s access to the Red Sea. There are few places that more vividly display the ironies of the Middle East. A shoreline no more than eight miles wide is embedded between the stark mountains of the Saudi coast to the south and the Israeli port of Eilat and the Egyptian Sinai to the west. To the north the desert sweeps to the horizon, interrupted irregularly by jagged hills that recall to mind the carefully contrived boulders in formal Japanese sand gardens. The brief, flat Red Sea shore is shared by the two coastal towns, Israeli Eilat and Jordanian Aqaba, nestling together and nearly merging as if part of the same community. Yet they share no services; their citizens never meet. Water-skiers and scuba divers offshore run the risk of straying inadvertently into the territorial waters of another country that is technically at war with their own. Planes approaching the respective airports must carefully avoid the airspace of the other, forcing one to land in a steep descent with either a Saudi or an Egyptian mountain range uncomfortably close by.

  This normal hazard was compounded at Aqaba because King Hussein, a passionate pilot, would occasionally take it into his head to fly out to greet visitors to whom he wished to pay special respect. On this occasion it pleased His Majesty to come out in a helicopter and perform aerobatics in the narrow space between the right wing of SAM 86970 and the Saudi mountains. Had there been a Jordanian official aboard our plane, he could have easily got us to sign any document as the price of getting his monarch to return to earth.

  On Saturday afternoon, January 19, we met in Hussein’s bungalow by the sea, less than a hundred yards from the barbed-wire fence that denoted the frontier with Israel. Hussein, his brother Crown Prince Hassan, Prime Minister Zaid Rifai, and Chief of Staff General Zaid Bin Shakir received us as friends. The Jordanians were warm in their praise of the disengagement agreement. “Both chiefs of staff were extremely angry with me,” I joked. “It is a tremendous achievement,” replied Hussein.

  But it also filled our Jordanian hosts with foreboding. They recognized that Syria had to be next; this was important so that radical Syria could not interfere with any move on the Jordanian front. But they wanted to be sure that their turn would come soon after, and if that was possible they would bend every effort to speed the process. In the meantime and as rapidly as possible, they wanted some discussions to begin at the
working level on some form of initial Israeli withdrawal from the occupied West Bank of the Jordan River, emulating the procedures in the Egyptian case. Jordan’s nightmare was that its Arab brethren would deprive it of the right to recover the territory it had lost to Israel in 1967. Jordan, in fact, had two nightmares about the West Bank: either indefinite Israeli occupation or a PLO state whose first target would be the Hashemite Kingdom.

  I was sympathetic. I shared Hussein’s strategic assessment:

  Israel has two choices: Either it can deal with Arafat or it can deal with Your Majesty. If I were an Israeli Prime Minister . . . I would rush into negotiations with Your Majesty because that is the best guarantee against Arafat.

  But here was a case where stating the alternatives did not advance matters, because in fact Israel wanted neither of them. So our discussions and their aftermath were a replay of what had occurred on my previous visit in December. On that occasion I had presented to Israeli leaders Rifai’s suggestion of a very modest “disengagement” in the Jordan valley, involving principally withdrawal from Jericho on the Jordan River. It had been rejected as inconsistent with the Allon plan, according to which Israel was to keep the Jordan valley as a military security line. I suggested that since Allon was in the room, there was nothing to keep the author from modifying his plan. This was treated as a joke and partially it was. But when I then asked whether some disengagement scheme based on the Allon plan could be put forward, I ran into a Catch-22: The Allon plan could not be the basis of disengagement on the Jordanian front because the coalition partner, the National Religious Party, opposed giving up any West Bank territory at all. Thus Israel would reject a proposal inconsistent with the Allon plan but would refuse also to negotiate the Allon plan because it could not get the full cabinet behind it.

  Undeterred, the Jordanians on this visit put forward a disengagement plan in which Jordan and Israel would each pull back eight kilometers from the river to the foothills of the mountain ranges that mark the Jordan valley. Jordanian civil administration would be established in the area vacated by Israel, especially in the town of Jericho. No Jordanian armed forces would cross the river or come closer than eight kilometers. A working group should be formed as rapidly as possible to ensure Jordan’s claim to represent the Palestinians. I told the King I would discuss his ideas with the Israelis in coming weeks.

  Hussein’s approach was moderate and statesmanlike. But it was futile while a new Israeli coalition was being formed, including a party that opposed any territorial change on the West Bank. Indeed, that state of affairs precluded even the formation of a working group. By the end of the year, doctrinaire fanaticism in the Arab world would soon turn this missed opportunity into strategic disaster. And the consequence was to block progress on the West Bank to the day of this writing.

  I spent the night in Hussein’s seaside retreat, then flew to Syria on Sunday morning, January 20.

  Damascus was even more tense than on my first visit in December. Sadat’s courtesy call apparently had not gone well. The Syrian leaders had refused to let him enter the city and insisted on meeting with him at the airport hotel. Damascus had earlier demanded that the Egyptian disengagement be held up until that with Syria was completed. But Sadat had not been prepared to keep his Third Army cut off in the desert while Syria acted out its own ambivalences in a protracted negotiation. Nor could I bring Asad the assurance that Israel would even be willing to discuss disengagement. Golda had been afraid to overload her cabinet with too many painful decisions. Yet she understood that the prospect of a Syrian disengagement might cause Asad to moderate his opposition to Sadat’s course. Her solution was Solomonic. Dayan, who in 1967 had been opposed to occupying the Golan Heights in the first place, was authorized to give me some “personal” ideas on a Syrian disengagement. I could convey these to Asad but I could not guarantee that Israel would stick by them if he accepted.

  This was too devious even for me. And as it turned out, the occasion for it never arose. For in my five hours with the Syrian leader, he proved much more eager to catalogue his grievances against Sadat and press his own demands than to find out Israel’s suggestions. I, in turn, was not eager to present Israeli ideas that were unofficial and so hedged that they were certain to multiply Syrian suspicions. Before my arrival, the head of our Interests Section in Damascus, Thomas Scotes, had sent me his analysis that Asad wanted to negotiate but would have to overcome a congenital hatred of Israel that ran deep in Syria and that if not slowly banked might even jeopardize his domestic position.

  The conduct of the Syrian leaders confirmed this. They treated me with great courtesy, partly to show that they did not hold me responsible for Egypt’s actions; partly because Sadat’s gamble had in fact worked — which may have been the main reason they were so angry. The Syrians were eager to reduce the Israeli bulge toward Damascus and, given their refusal to meet with Israelis, they needed me as a mediator. They no longer put forth preconditions. Unlike four weeks earlier, they did not insist on being handed the outline of an agreement only the technical implementation of which they would discuss. They were clearly willing to negotiate, indeed afraid to be left out.

  Abd al-Halim Khaddam, the ferocious Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs, led into the new phase in his characteristically needling way by coyly complaining that Jordan seemed to have pride of place in the disengagement process. Would that it were so, I thought. But what I said was: “Israel is giving preferential treatment to Syria based on the long history of affection that exists.”

  “The affection is reciprocal,” replied Khaddam with a grin. He seemed to be seeking reassurance: “Always the right is on the side of the strong,” he said sarcastically, referring to Israel, “because he is strong.”

  I had learned that Khaddam had respect only for those who stood up to him. Therefore I said: “Not all the weak are necessarily innocent.”

  But Khaddam was not interested in winning philosophical points. He wanted to make sure I would engage myself on the Syrian front as I had on the Egyptian: “All we were asking for is justice. We are certain that your effort will yield positive results. The essential thing is that you have put yourself inside the problem. This is the essential thing.”

  For Khaddam, fiercely nationalistic, proudly radical, to admit that American cooperation was essential was revolutionary. To express faith in our purposes must have been a wrench. (Khaddam’s attitude toward the United States was shown in an exchange with our Ambassador, Richard Murphy, months later. As my plane was coming in to land, Murphy said, not without ambivalence himself: “I think the airplane is God’s punishment to mankind.” “No,” replied Khaddam simply; “America is.”) In this mood we repaired to the Presidency, where President Asad treated me to an hour and a half’s disquisition on Sadat’s duplicity, its controlled fury all the more impressive for his eerily cold, seemingly unemotional demeanor. Asad then encouraged me to give him a tutorial on current international affairs, interspersed with his sardonic comments. Since I suspected he might convey at least part of the conversation to Moscow, I gave him a boilerplate reassurance: “Our policy is not anti-Soviet; we recognize that the USSR has major interests in the Middle East. We are not combating them.” Asad might be without experience of the outside world but he understood reality: “You are about to force them out of the peace negotiations and you are not combating them?” he responded without acrimony, even with a tinge of respect.

  He then had another little joke. Having heard from all his brethren of my principle that Soviet arms could not be permitted to defeat American arms, he proposed to equip the Syrian army with American weapons! This exchange occurred:

  KISSINGER: You should be grateful. Every time I come to Damascus, you get another shipment of tanks [from the Soviet Union].

  ASAD: You are going on an errand that might make us not need more tanks. We have asked our Arab brothers who are not on the confrontation line to buy us American weapons.

  KISSINGER: What weap
ons are you interested in?

  ASAD: Any kind of weapons — tanks, rockets, anything — just so there will be no more talk about American weapons versus Soviet weapons. The problem should be pictured as Arab against Israel, not as the US versus the USSR. I was told by other Arabs that you would not allow American arms to be defeated by Soviet arms. So, I would propose that we develop a situation where US arms are against US arms.

  KISSINGER: The President’s next move will be to encourage Israel to buy Soviet arms.

  But when the banter was over, Asad accepted in principle the start of a disengagement negotiation for Syria under American auspices. He even had a plan, somewhat scaled down from the version of a month before when he proposed to put the disengagement line along the 1967 border. In Syria, “scaled down” is a relative term. Asad’s opening position now was that in the name of disengagement Israel give up all of its gains from the October war plus half of the Golan Heights taken in 1967. I mused about the fireworks that would come when Golda heard this proposition.

  Still, Asad had done some homework. He even proposed a scheme for a zone of limited armaments, though it was very modest, extending only five kilometers on either side of a dividing line. This was not much, but then the Golan Heights did not have the depth of Sinai — the whole area is less than twenty miles wide. I did not waste time in debate; there was no sense discussing terms when Israel had not yet accepted even the principle of negotiations. I told Asad I would stop in Israel to leave his ideas there. (I was eager to create an impression of some progress in Damascus to ease the threat of Sadat’s isolation.) Asad came close to promising a list of Israeli prisoners of war — the minimum Israeli condition for negotiations: “Once efforts have progressed a little, we will agree with you on giving a suitable number.” He added the crucial reassurance that no Israeli prisoners had died.