Ignoring the advice of his top political aides, Carter at first supported the Egyptian resolution condemning the Israeli settlements. The president was so adamant that they were illegal, and so determined to show Egypt and the Arab world that he was not in Israel’s pocket, that he was willing to take the political heat at home and risk further straining relations with Israel. This was quintessential Jimmy Carter, doing what he considered “the right thing” regardless of the political consequences. But at the end of the day, we persuaded him to back off. Ultimately, the United States abstained from voting on the resolution, which was approved, but made little difference to the Begin government anyway.
18
SADAT CHANGES HISTORY
Anwar el-Sadat was a master of the dramatic gesture and knew how to draw the attention of the world. As the first Arab leader to commit himself publicly to direct talks with Israel, he basked in the attention of American television. To Americans, who tend to believe that nothing is real unless they have seen it on TV, it may seem that Sadat’s decision to go to Jerusalem was negotiated before their eyes in interviews by two network news stars, Walter Cronkite and Barbara Walters. In fact he had been moving toward his historic break with Egypt’s aggressively pan-Arab past for several months.
Our two Middle East ambassadors confirmed it. Hermann Eilts in Cairo said that Sadat “was desperate. Peace was slipping through his fingers.”1 Sam Lewis in Tel Aviv recalled that while the president hoped Sadat would be more flexible on some of the formulations for the conference, the Egyptian leader saw Carter as unable to shape and manage it without help from others, including himself.2 It certainly did not help when Sadat saw “Carter cave in to Dayan at the UN, where Carter ate crow, almost publicly,” as Brzezinski later put it to me.3
Others believe that the decisive moment came when Sadat read the joint announcement of the conference and feared the Soviets would be regaining diplomatic influence in the Middle East. He also did not want to give Syria’s Assad a veto over his getting back the Sinai from Israel. But none of this fully explains why Sadat decided to take the gamble of publicly reaching out to Israel. He expected his grand gesture of reconciliation would be repaid by Begin in kind—withdrawal of Israeli troops from almost all territory they had conquered in the Six-Day War and progress toward the establishment of a Palestinian state. But Sadat did not fully know his tenacious and ideological opponent; the road to an agreement would be far longer and more tortuous than he could have imagined.
Mark Siegel was accompanying a congressional delegation visiting Cairo, when he heard Sadat tell them: “You know I did not risk my life, and you know we did not break relations with the Soviet Union, and you know hundreds of thousands of Egyptian boys did not die—so that the U.S. government could bring back the Soviet Union to control Egypt.” He then threw a political bombshell and declared he would travel to Jerusalem if invited. Siegel rushed to the U.S. Embassy; it was late at night and almost everyone had gone home, so he typed a cable alerting the State Department. Then Siegel called me while I was having lunch with Ham, and finally flew to Jerusalem to urge Lewis to arrange a formal invitation.4
But the Carter administration did little to adjust to events as history moved with great speed. Ham instructed Siegel: “‘The president wants you to low-key this. The president doesn’t want you to say anything enthusiastic or positive to the press.’” Siegel was shocked: “I said: ‘Hamilton, do you know what’s going on here? I mean, this is like a miracle taking place, you know. I have to say something positive.’ And I was told not to.”5 That was because Carter was still barreling ahead toward a comprehensive Mideast conference, while the only two countries actually interested in negotiating with each other had no interest in his broad-based forum.
Sadat’s bold decision did not come out of thin air, but out of domestic as well as diplomatic imperatives that the administration only vaguely understood. By early 1977, major public demonstrations, then an exceedingly rare phenomenon in Egypt, left Sadat shaken. He needed to shift toward peacetime investment and lighten the economic burden of maintaining large armed forces. Moreover, Sadat saw a diplomatic opportunity because he believed Begin’s hard-line views would help him push through a deal over any domestic obstruction. As the Egyptian diplomat Ahmed Aboul Gheit put it to me, the 1973 war showed “how easy it was that you go into battle and you lose in one day 150 to 200 tanks.” Sadat had broken with the Soviets and was casting his lot with the Americans. He realized that if he wanted to replace Soviet weapons with meaningful American military and economic support, he could get it only by making a bold move with Israel, because of his perception of the political influence of American Jews and, more broadly, the support of the American public for Israel.6
Sadat took several steps in private before he felt he was ready for Jerusalem. After Begin traveled to Romania, Sadat followed and was advised by Ceauşescu that while Begin was a “tough, strong man, once he had made his mind up, he could deliver.” The Shah of Iran gave him similar advice,7 and Marshal Tito of Yugoslavia also urged him to move forward. Unbeknownst to Washington, King Hassan II of Morocco arranged a secret meeting at his vacation home in Marrakech between Dayan and Hassan al-Tuhami, Egypt’s deputy prime minister and one of Sadat’s closest confidants.8 Tuhami, a shadowy mystic and former head of Egyptian intelligence, made fantastic claims that he could stop his heart for long periods of time and could tame lions—an ideal partner for the swaggering Dayan. The Moroccan king also hosted a meeting between the chief of Israel’s Mossad, Yitzhak Hofi, and his Egyptian counterpart, Kamal Hassan Ali. As an earnest sign of goodwill, Hofi provided intelligence information of a plot by Libya’s Mu’ammar Gadhafi and the PLO to assassinate Sadat. Egyptian intelligence confirmed the information, and this indicated to Sadat that he might be able to trust the Israelis. His idea was to hold an international conference in Cairo with the five permanent members of the UN Security Council presiding over a meeting between him and Begin. Carter warned him: “That won’t work; don’t do it.”9
For Sadat that was the last straw. He decided to act on his own, without telling Carter. Within less than three weeks of the ill-fated joint communiqué, Carter’s efforts were upended by Sadat’s historic visit to Jerusalem. Sadat wiped it all away with a few lines to the Egyptian parliament that shocked even his own foreign minister. “Israel will be stunned to hear me tell you that I am ready to go to the ends of the earth, and even to their home, to the Knesset itself, to argue with them in order to prevent one Egyptian soldier from being wounded.”10 Only then did the administration realize that Sadat meant what he said.
In Washington the reaction was far from jubilant. After all, Carter’s grand plan had been derailed. Sadat’s bold stroke was at first met with skepticism, which finally gave way to acceptance because there was no other choice. Brzezinski summed up the diplomatic explosion and consequent rush of events: “And then bing! Or bang! came this announcement that he’s going to go on his own [to Jerusalem]. So I think by then we were pretty wary … [but] within a very short period of time, we concluded that, instead of opposing it, we’d better embrace it, and hopefully give it some broader dimension.”11 At a cabinet meeting in Washington on November 14, only five days before Sadat’s historic visit, Vance declared: “Nothing will come out of the Begin-Sadat exchange, but it is good for the atmosphere.”12
Not so the Israelis. Rabin felt that Sadat’s decision was “total desperation” because “all his strategy was on the verge of collapse.” Rabin believed Sadat had “burnt his bridges to the Soviet Union”; a “continuation of war with Israel would put a tremendous burden on the Egyptian economy that will lead nowhere”; and while he had caught Israel by surprise in the 1973 Yom Kippur War, it did not end with victory for Egypt, and “he didn’t want to continue to stick on the course of the war as the main instrument of Egypt to achieve its goals.”13
Senior Egyptian officials were also in a state of shock. Foreign Minister Ismail Fahmy resigned.14 His chief aide Osam
a el-Baz asked Sadat if he was not afraid that the reaction of the Egyptian people would be negative, to which Sadat responded: “I have no fear whatsoever of this; it is not a matter of life or death.”15
Begin initially was skeptical, but instructed his communications director Yehuda Avner to draft a welcoming response to be broadcast in Arabic that concluded: “Let us make peace. Let us start on the path of friendship.”16 Lewis then told Begin that Sadat wanted a handwritten invitation. Notwithstanding five wars between the two countries, Begin promptly wrote a warm letter of invitation to Sadat, which he handed to the American ambassador as go-between “in a very public, flamboyant dramatic ceremony in Begin’s office at the Knesset.”17
The president soon realized that he needed to make the most of the radically changed situation and tried to bring in the Palestinians. Years later Carter insisted to me that he had approved of Sadat’s gamble,18 but at the time he sounded very different. As I was heading down the narrow hallway toward the Oval Office with the president going the other way, he pointedly addressed me: “Stu, I think I am going to oppose Sadat’s visit. It will be the end of any hope of a comprehensive peace and will result only at best in a bilateral agreement between Egypt and Israel.” I was astonished and said, “Mr. President, you can’t do that. Sadat’s visit will be historic, and it will be catastrophic if you are seen as opposing the first visit of an Arab combatant to Israel since its creation.” He grumbled and kept walking.
Carter finally faced reality and threw the weight of the presidency behind Sadat. Had he not done so, said Ephraim Evron, then of the Israeli Foreign Ministry, there would have been no peace agreement because “when we were left alone with the Egyptians, nothing happened.” Even so, Evron felt that if the administration had moved more quickly to embrace Sadat’s trip, King Hussein of Jordan might have come aboard before Arab extremists had time to rally against it.19
On November 17, two days before Sadat’s arrival in Jerusalem, I called Hanon Bar-On, the second in command at the Israeli Embassy, to urge that Begin issue a positive statement giving Carter some credit. By 6:00 p.m., he called back and reported that Begin had sent the president a letter saying the visit “would have been impossible without Carter’s efforts.” Carter put pressure on Begin, the Arabs, and America’s European allies as well, to help make Sadat’s visit to Jerusalem successful by not condemning it even before it began.20 He warned Begin in particular to help Sadat with other Arab leaders by not limiting the negotiation to the Sinai. But that limited agenda was precisely what Begin wanted and essentially what he got. As for Egypt, despite Carter’s efforts it was suspended from the Arab League, whose headquarters moved from Cairo to Tunis.
“I AM NOT COMING TO ATTACK”
All who gathered to welcome Sadat on November 19 seemed to share the same sense of bearing witness to a unique moment in history. His arrival in Israel was timed after sundown Saturday so it no longer would be Shabbat. The great white Boeing military plane with “Arab Republic of Egypt” on its side appeared out of the dark sky over Ben-Gurion Airport. A seventy-two-man honor guard from every branch of Israel’s armed forces dipped its colors and presented arms. Boutros Boutros-Ghali (then minister of state for foreign affairs, later UN secretary general) wrote that as the doors of the plane opened, “I felt I was looking at a page of history being written with letters of fire. Israel seemed as strange to me as a land in outer space.… Sadat stood bathed in the glare of what seemed like a thousand floodlights. His presence seemed like a biblical vision.”21 A T-shaped red carpet extended to the place where Sadat’s plane would stop. The conductor of the military band could not locate a copy of the Egyptian national anthem and had to transcribe it from a Radio Cairo broadcast.22 Lewis remembered vividly that as Sadat stepped from his plane: “He stood there at attention with the spotlight on him, wearing a gleaming white uniform while the Egyptian and Israeli national anthems were played. All around us and behind us, among the Israeli dignitaries you could hear some very uncharacteristic sounds of people weeping with joy and amazement.”23
As he slowly, dramatically descended, Golda Meir remarked to Rabin: “Now he comes! Couldn’t he have come before the Yom Kippur War and saved all those dead, his and ours?”24 When he came face-to-face with her, “they looked at each other solemnly, half-bowing as he took her hand. ‘I have wanted to talk to you for a long time,’ he said. ‘And I have been waiting for you for a long time,’ she answered. ‘But now I am here,’ he said. ‘Shalom. Welcome,’ she said.” When Sadat reached Ariel Sharon, the commander who led the successful counterattack across the Suez Canal in the 1973 war, Sadat joked: “Aha, here you are! I tried to chase you in the desert. If you try to cross my canal again, I’ll have to lock you up.”25 Moving down the receiving line, he also tweaked the army chief of staff, Mordechai “Mota” Gur, the leader of IDF who captured Jerusalem in 1967. He had warned Begin that Sadat’s plan was a deceit to throw Israel off guard and urged a general mobilization, but Begin overruled him. “You see,” Sadat addressed the celebrated soldier, “I am not coming to attack.”26
Israel faced a daunting task of protecting its distinguished visitor from assassination—potentially by Syrian, Palestinian, or even Jewish extremists. Israeli security had no armored limousine, so Ambassador Lewis loaned his black Cadillac with the license plate discreetly changed and the American radio equipment temporarily reset.27 But that was the limit of America’s role.
The next day Sadat addressed the Knesset, and to maintain credibility in the Arab world, he did not publicly deviate from hard-line Arab positions. Defense Minister Ezer Weizman, founder of the Israeli air force, despaired that “I saw no bridge to span this mighty chasm.”28 But what Sadat did offer Israel was normal relations with its mortal enemy and most powerful Arab neighbor. Begin did not fully rise to the occasion. As was his habit, he dwelled on the “tragic history of the Jewish people.” Before the Knesset he told Sadat: “No sir, we took no foreign land. We returned to our Homeland.” He cautiously appealed for reconciliation between Jews and Arabs and invited King Hussein of Jordan as the “genuine spokesmen of the Palestinian Arabs” to join the peace effort.29
This was Begin’s only allusion to the Palestinians, a dismissal of their interest that Carter found unfortunate, to say the least. To help take pressure off Sadat, Brzezinski asked me to relay our request that Begin also show his willingness to negotiate with Palestinian Arabs in the joint announcement following the visit. It was my task to send this through Dinitz, as well as to warn of intense reactions to Begin’s speech in the Arab world. As Dinitz put it in his cable (which I obtained years later from the Israeli archives), Carter did not want to be perceived as giving advice, since in the president’s “opinion the two men [Begin and Sadat] ran their affairs thus far in an exemplary fashion.”30
At a senior staff meeting the next day in the Oval Office, the president said: “The question is whether Begin remains adamant or will be more flexible.” At a cabinet meeting later that morning he made what turned out to be an overly optimistic forecast: “Sadat will help fracture animosities, and there will be no long-term deleterious effects.” Carter still had some forlorn hope of reviving the Geneva conference, but conceded that we could fall back on the new ties between Israel and Egypt.31 That is exactly what happened.
In the first days of November the president gave a speech to try to reassure the American Jewish community and Israel about his commitment to their security and opposition to a Palestinian state. When I called Dinitz to underscore its positive tone, he still found areas to criticize, like the president’s emphasis on the “legitimate rights” of the Palestinians, which I later learned he reflected in a top-secret cable to Jerusalem.32
I now saw in Jimmy Carter an important aspect of presidential leadership: the ability to pivot out of a dead-end policy, bounce back, and continue to move ahead in utterly unexpected circumstances. Through almost all the first year of his presidency, Carter had staked his Middle East policy on a comprehe
nsive settlement with all of Israel’s enemies, through a reconvened Geneva conference. The president, Vance, and Brzezinski had put enormous efforts into achieving this goal, however unrealistic it might have been. Nevertheless Carter had moved the dials and helped unfreeze some positions. In one way or another, his ill-conceived Geneva peace process served as a catalyst for Sadat’s trip to Jerusalem, and then he moved to broaden a purely bilateral deal between Egypt and Israel into one that would offer the Palestinians some hope of controlling their own destiny.
But what about the Egyptians? As their delegation was waiting to fly back to Cairo, they engaged in an informal discussion at the airport with Dayan. Egypt’s UN ambassador Ahmed Asmat Abdel-Meguid asked Dayan to explain the basis of Israel’s claim to the West Bank: “Is it historical? Is it political? Or is it strategic? Tell us.” And Dayan did: “No, everything. It is a political claim. It’s a security claim.” For the crestfallen Egyptians this meant that the Israelis would not accept withdrawal in exchange for an Egyptian offer of political stability and diplomatic recognition.33
This dramatized how much Israel’s position had been changed by Begin’s election. For Labor, the West Bank was a security issue. For Begin and the Likud it was a historical and religious claim. Security can be negotiated; history and religion cannot. Sadat had expected a grand gesture from Begin in exchange for his own, and he was bound to be disappointed—a pattern that extended throughout the negotiations to come.
Still, Sadat had calculated his people’s mood correctly. When he arrived in Cairo, millions of Egyptians were lining the streets celebrating his return. He knew he had the support of the military because he could provide them with modern American arms, as well as the support of the intelligence service—“the pillars of authority in our society,” as Gheit characterized them to me.34
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