Year of Peace and Decision

A year ago last week, the guns fell silent along the Suez Canal as Egypt and Israel announced their acceptance of U.S. Secretary of State William Rogers' plan for a ceasefire. At the time, United Nations Secretary-General U Thant declared: "The road ahead is long, arduous and uncertain, but if only there is a will for peace, all obstacles can be surmounted and peace will be achieved." In the year since, few obstacles have been surmounted, and a formula for peace has yet to be found. But the year-long respite has produced a profound change in the mood of the combatants (see box, following page).

Along the canal, TIME Correspondent Marsh Clark found an almost dreamlike calm, the silence broken by only the cawing of a blackbird and the sound of popular music from a radio in an Israeli bunker. Visitors were greeted by a red-and-white sign in Hebrew: LEISURE AND HOLIDAY VILLAGE. Near by, Israeli troops could see the skyline of the deserted city of Suez shimmering in the haze, and sometimes caught a glimpse of Egyptian soldiers swimming, fishing or making occasional threatening gestures in their direction. For their part, the Israelis tended tomato patches, sunned themselves or played chess. As one ranking Israeli official put it last week, the peace has endured because "on all sides, there is a reluctance to resume fighting."

Sadat's Assurance. There is also a deep-seated resistance to making concessions to achieve a permanent peace, as U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Joseph Sisco rediscovered during a ten-day visit to Israel that ended last week. Sisco's primary objective was to find ways to reach an interim settlement leading to the reopening of the Suez Canal, thereby helping to ease Egypt's humiliation over the continued occupation of its territory by Israeli forces. The way for Sisco's trip was paved by an assurance given by Egyptian President Anwar Sadat to Don Bergus, the senior U.S. diplomat in Cairo, that Egypt was still interested in achieving an interim settlement--providing it led to an eventual Israeli pullback from all Arab territory--and was still amenable to having the U.S. serve as a mediator.

The Egyptians insist on at least a token presence of their troops on the east bank of the canal, and the U.S. is believed to have suggested to the Israelis that they pull back to the Mitla Pass, some 25 miles from the canal. There were further reports last week that in return for such a withdrawal, the Nixon Administration was considering a plan to sell Israel about 50 Phantom jets and 60 Skyhawks over the next three to four years.

Sisco presented Israeli Premier Golda Meir with a bouquet at the final session ("So you are saying it with flowers," she observed dryly), and described his talks with the Israelis as "friendly." But on occasion they were fairly heated. Some Israelis argued the rather Byzantine notion that by their very intransigence, they were impelling Sadat to depend more heavily on the U.S. and less on the Russians for finding a solution; Sisco took the position that Sadat would be more likely to accept a peaceful settlement if the Israelis were to show greater flexibility. The Israelis also expressed their fear of what is known in Jerusalem as the "losing war" syndrome: that Egypt might decide to provoke a new conflict in order to lose and thereby force the imposition of a big-power solution.

Arab Setbacks. The only concrete offer Sisco could extract from the hard-bargaining Israelis was a modest concession to withdraw five or six miles from the canal with the condition that no Egyptian soldiers cross to the east bank. When Sisco proposed a "symbolic" crossing of Egyptian troops to the east bank, Mrs. Meir replied quite sarcastically. She reminded him that last year, when Israel complained of massive Soviet missile movements near the canal in violation of the ceasefire, Sisco soothingly suggested that all those SA-3s were merely symbolic.

When he left Israel, Sisco said: "I expected no breakthroughs. None were achieved." That was candid, but disheartening. When Egypt's Sadat described 1971 as the "year of decision," one of the things he meant was that there would have to be some diplomatic progress if the year-old cease-fire were to last much longer.

The Israelis realize full well that their relative strength has increased during the past year, if only because of the setbacks suffered by the Arabs. Two events overshadow all the others in the Arab world: the death of Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser, the Arabs' only supranational leader, and the crushing by Jordan's King Hussein of the Palestinian guerrillas who long operated freely within his country's borders. Only last month, in a continuing display of disunity, Syria and Iraq closed their borders with Jordan in protest against Hussein's routing of the guerrillas; two weeks ago, Libya's impetuous young strongman, Muammar Gaddafi, urged the Jordanian army to overthrow its King.

The Arab cause was further shaken by the recent coup and countercoup in the Sudan. Restored to power two weeks ago, Sudan's Major General Jaafar Numeiry accused the Soviet Union and Bulgaria of having had a hand in his temporary overthrow. Last week he summarily expelled the senior Soviet and Bulgarian diplomats in Khartoum, withdrew his own envoy to Moscow, and sacked the five Communist Ministers in his Cabinet. Fearful of being attacked by angry Arab mobs, hundreds of Russian and East European technicians in the Sudan remained in their quarters. When the Soviet press launched an attack against him for his anti-Communist campaign, which included the execution of three top party officials, Numeiry demanded in fury that the Soviets end their diatribe within 48 hours.

Nobody's Satellites. Although disputes in the Arab world usually sound worse than they actually are, it was clear that the Soviet Union, which had heretofore been Numeiry's chief military supplier, would never again be so strong in the Sudan. "Our people have rejected the Communist Party and the ideas that it propagates," Numeiry declared in an interview with TIME Correspondent Eric Robins. "The recent events have proved that the dissolved Communist Party was isolated and that our people were faithful to their religion, traditions and the principles of our own revolution." He implied that the coup would improve the Sudan's relations with China and even the U.S. There can be no resumption of diplomatic relations with the U.S. so long as the U.S. continues to support the Israeli cause, said Numeiry, "but our economic and cultural relations with America have endured, and I hope it may be possible to expand them." He described his relations with China as "excellent," knowing full well how much that would upset Moscow. Added Numeiry: "We are happy to observe a steady growth of cooperation with the Chinese in all fields."

Numeiry's stance underscored the deep-rooted resistance in Arab lands to Communist ideology, as distinct from Soviet aid (TIME, Aug. 9). Egypt, for example, relies almost totally on Moscow for military equipment, including some sophisticated Soviet aircraft--a handful of MIG-235 and about 20 SU-11s the hottest planes in the Russian air force. Even so, President Anwar Sadat told a closed session of his Arab Socialist Union two weeks ago that Egypt would never become Communist, would never recognize an Arab Communist government and would continue to resist Communism throughout the Arab world. A prominent Egyptian added pointedly last week: "If the Soviets want to read political interpretations into Arab arrangements with them, that is their business. We are the satellites of no one."

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