Arabs v. Israelis in a Suez Showdown

"There is a process of osmosis in the Arab world today. A new Arab will slowly emerge. The old world of sheiks and sultans will fade away, and the new Arab will replace them. This probably will not happen in my lifetime, but only when it happens will the Palestine problem be finally solved." --Gamal Abdel Nasser, 1960

Nasser is long dead. The Palestinian problem is far from solved. But the day of the New Arab he predicted does indeed seem to be emerging. Last week thousands upon thousands of Arabs were fighting Israelis--with a skill and determination they had never shown during the disastrous Six-Day War of 1967--in the bloodiest conflict in the modern history of the Middle East. At week's end the outcome was in doubt, though the tide of battle seemed to be turning slowly in favor of the Israelis. While fighting continued in the Sinai, Israel managed to put a force of 15,000 men and 350 tanks across the Suez Canal, where it smashed SAM sites and artillery positions along the western bank and fought its way 15 miles into Egypt in the direction of Cairo about 60 miles away. Unless the Egyptians could check the Israeli advance in the west, the action there was bound to lead to the erosion of the Egyptian position in the Sinai over the next several days.

However the battle might end, it was already clear that the Arabs had never fought better against the Israelis. No longer were they so likely to be dismissed as powerless and posturing giants too weak to defeat the tiniest of neighbors. The extraordinary flowering of Arab machismo was dynamically expressed by Nasser's successor, President Anwar Sadat, in a speech before Egypt's People's Assembly (see box page 29). "No matter what happens in the desert, there has been a victory that cannot be erased," said Sadat. "According to any military standard, the Egyptian armed forces have realized a miracle. The wounded nation has restored its honor; the political map of the Middle East has changed."

Even as Sadat spoke, Egyptian and Israeli armies were locked in one of the greatest tank battles in history. Some military observers estimated, in fact, that more tanks and armor were involved than in the classic World War II tank battle at El Alamein in 1942. Cairo newspapers grandly billed the conflict as "the biggest tank collision in the history of war."

It was also, and perhaps more importantly, a missile battle. The Egyptians' Soviet-built SA2, SA3 and new, mobile SA-6 and SA-7 missiles were planted on both banks of the canal. With their high-technology controls, the SAMs held the key to victory or defeat. The Israelis, who had easily established air superiority in the previous Middle East war, had to destroy this fortress of SAMs and artillery. In the first week of the war, Israel had lost about one-fourth of its air force; most of the planes had been shot down by SAMs. Since a direct aerial assault on the missile sites might have proved suicidal, the Israelis chose to attack them instead on the ground.

As the week began, Egyptian forces held firm in their positions on the eastern bank of the Suez Canal, protected from Israeli planes by the umbrella of artillery and missiles. Occasionally they staged commando raids behind Israeli lines, including two on Sharm el Sheikh, at the mouth of the Gulf of Aqaba. By midweek the Egyptian buildup in the Sinai had reached more than 100,000 men and 1,000 tanks. They struck spasmodically at Israeli positions in an effort to ease the pressure on Syrian, Jordanian and Iraqi forces on the battlefronts of the Golan Heights.

Then the Israelis struck back, in the central sector of the front along the eastern bank. Jets screeched overhead, and the eerie white tracks of ground-to-air missiles marked the bright autumn sky. Hundreds of M-60 Patton tanks moved through the golden dunes and barren hills of the Sinai, throwing up huge rooster tails of swirling sand.

The purpose of the dramatic assault quickly became clear. In a surprise push, the Israelis sent a spearhead of tanks and armor across the canal just north of the Bitter Lakes to the western bank. The goal of the task force was to destroy missile and artillery sites in Egypt and harass the supply lines that nourished the Egyptian divisions in the Sinai. The Israelis quickly resupplied the infiltration commando force with tanks, halftracks and artillery, first by barge and later across bridges hastily constructed north of the Great Bitter Lake. By week's end the force of 15,000 men was making headway in a three-pronged assault on the western bank of the canal: northward toward Ismailia, southward toward Port Suez and westward toward Cairo.

How long would the fateful battle last? "It will not be measured in months or weeks," said Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Dayan, who made a sudden inspection of his forces on the western bank. But massive tank battles have traditionally dragged on for many days without resolution. The principal fighting at El Alamein lasted almost a fortnight before British Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery finally broke through Rommel's line; by that time neither side had many serviceable tanks left.

While the savage battle raged in the Sinai, the northern front was relatively calm. Syrian forces had been bolstered by contingents from Iraq, Jordan and Saudi Arabia, but for most of the week the front was stable. Having cleared Syrian troops from most of the Golan Heights, the Israelis had carved out a comparatively narrow salient aimed at the heart of Syria before being stopped near the village of Saassa about 23 miles from Damascus. It appeared that the Israelis were content to solidify their gains there while turning their attention to the Sinai.

Crispin's Day. Elsewhere, the military action was minimal. Saudi Arabia's King Feisal sent a token force to aid the Syrians and Jordan's King Hussein sent 7,000 men, but Hussein wisely avoided hostilities along his country's 300-mile border with Israel.

One of the most dramatic exploits of the week was the raid on the Beirut branch of the Bank of America by five terrorists who said they belonged to the Lebanese Revolutionary Socialist Movement. They held more than 30 prisoners hostage overnight while demanding that all Palestinian guerrillas be freed from Lebanese prisons and that the bank donate $10 million to the Arab war against Israel. Next morning police stormed the building and freed the hostages. Five people were killed: three guerrilla's, one hostage, one policeman.

By the end of the war's 15th day, a resolution of the conflict did not yet seem imminent. Diplomatic intervention by the superpowers might lead eventually to a ceasefire; so might the frightful casualties being incurred by both sides. But first there must come a decisive turn in the fortunes of battle. If at week's end the Israelis at last appeared to be pulling into the lead, the combatants themselves did not seem to realize it. The Arabs were still deeply proud of their new-found military prowess. The Israelis were still stricken with a bitterness perhaps greater than any they had known before.

Most Israelis simply did not accept the Arabs' protests that their only aim in the war was a return of the territory lost in 1967. Had the country given up the ground it won in 1967, many Israelis believed, their nation would have been exterminated.

The mood in Egypt, on the other hand, was initially one of elation and even amazement. That spirit of confidence was fueled in part, by the rhetoric of Egypt's President Mohamed Anwar Sadat, often maligned even by his own people. Scarcely three weeks ago, Egyptians scoffed when President Sadat publicly warned that "the stage of total confrontation" was soon to begin. After all, it was a claim that he had made many times before and never acted upon. But last week, as Egyptian forces surged across the Suez Canal into the Sinai, thousands of Sadat's countrymen lined the streets when he drove to the Parliament building in Cairo to address the People's Assembly Cheering "deliriously," as one paper put it, the crowd shouted: "Victory for Sadat!"

His hour-long speech more than lived up to popular expectations. With its redolent phrases describing Egypt's finest military hour, the address distantly recalled the great Crispin's Day oration in Shakespeare's Henry V. More significant was its substance. There was the predictable touch of saber rattling as Sadat warned that Egypt now had a homemade missile, the Zafir (Victor), that was capable of striking "the deepest depths of Israel." Yet under the guise of what he called an "open letter" to President Nixon, Sadat also offered a very concrete set of peace proposals. They included a ceasefire, provided that the Israelis would, under international supervision, withdraw to the pre-1967 war boundaries; an international peace conference at the U.N. to be attended by Palestinian as well as Arab leaders; and reopening the Suez Canal as soon as the "liberation" of the eastern bank had been completed.

The proposals were not, on the face of it, likely to be accepted by Israel. Nonetheless, the speech demonstrated a far more conciliatory position than the Egyptians had taken for several years. It was notable that Sadat now felt strong enough to talk at all about peace and the limited objectives he seeks. Before Oct. 6 neither he nor any other Egyptian leader could have done so. By and large, the speech was well received in the Arab world. In Cairo, the reaction was positively ecstatic. Editorials called it a "triumph of reason" and "the most beautiful speech delivered by an Arab head of state to the present generation."

White Horse. Sadat's proposals were essentially nationalist rather than revolutionary. Thus his message could hardly have pleased the Palestinians, who yearn for a return of the lands that were lost in 1948. Although Sadat skirted the Palestinian issue, fedayeen leaders did not object openly to the speech; seemingly, they are resigned to playing a subordinate role in the current stage of the struggle against Israel.

What has most surprised the world about the latest Middle East war is the astonishing transformation of the Arab fighting force--indeed of the Arab psyche--that it seems to imply. In truth, the change is not as sudden as it may seem; the Arab forces were not really as hopeless as they appeared to be in 1967, or probably as able as they look today. Nonetheless, it does seem that a new Arab spirit is emerging, and the darkest irony is that the chief catalyst of that change is the Arab nations' principal enemy.

The Israeli challenge since 1948 has had much to do with the thrusting of the Arabs into the modern world. "We really should thank Israel for forcing us to grow up," a Beirut publisher remarked last week. In Cairo, a Palestinian businessman recalled the time in 1948 when his father met with a group of fellow Palestinians to plan for the war against Israel. "They proclaimed King Abdullah of Trans-Jordan as commander of their army," he said, "and several members of the group proposed that Abdullah, a descendant of the Prophet, should ride on a white horse like a caliph at the head of his troops. Twenty-five years later, their sons are fighting with some of the most sophisticated weaponry ever used in war."

After the Six-Day War, Egypt's humiliated military leaders did their best to analyze their mistakes. An Egyptian general told TIME Correspondent Wilton Wynn last week: "We concluded that our 1967 defeat was largely due to the fact that our air force had been knocked out immediately. We also concluded that the enemy was not so strong as it seemed, and we were not so bad as we had looked."

The Egyptian military command made a thorough study of the kind of desert war that would have to be fought against Israel and trained the army carefully for it. That meant, for one thing, that the goal was not to occupy territory but to destroy the enemy forces. "A desert is like an ocean," an Egyptian officer told Wynn. "A navy doesn't try to occupy a big segment of the ocean; it tries to destroy the enemy fleet. The desert is a paradise for a tactical commander but hell for a logistics officer."

For the past six years, Egyptian soldiers have been using the irrigation canals of the Nile Valley as training ground for the attack they some day expected to make across the Suez. Explains one Egyptian military man: "Our men bridged those canals again and again and again, till they reached the point that crossing a canal was simple. On Oct. 6, the only difference was that across this canal was the real enemy." Within 72 hours, the Egyptians managed to move more than 70,000 troops and an estimated 500 to 700 tanks to the eastern bank--a remarkable logistical feat by any military standard.

The Arab forces did not, to be sure, accomplish these successes entirely on their own. Some Western military observers believe that Soviet advisers played a key role in the creditable performance of both the Syrian and Egyptian armies in the current war. Despite Sadat's well-publicized expulsion of some 17,000 Soviet technicians last year, Egypt now has about 1,000 Russian military advisers. While Egyptian troops fired the Russian-built SAMs at Israeli planes, the more complex job of coordinating and planning the missile attacks was handled by Soviet experts. Advisers from the U.S.S.R. also helped the Syrian armed forces. In fact, the estimated 100 Soviet MIGs that Moscow sent to Syria last week were reassembled at Aleppo by Russian technicians.

The entire Arab world, disunited as it was, was shocked by the 1967 defeat. "No Westerner," says a Lebanese intellectual, "can fully understand the sense of peril we felt after 1967." He traces the rise of the new Arab mentality to Nasser's "farewell" speech, of June 1967, in which the humiliated Egyptian leader declared: "The imperialists believe this was a personal defeat for Nasser. But it was a defeat for the whole Arab people, and the Arab people will not accept that defeat."

Two months later, at a postwar conference in Khartoum, Nasser achieved a sort of pan-Arab detente, primarily with Saudi Arabia and Libya. The new relationship between Egypt and Saudi Arabia was particularly important because it helped eradicate the ideological conflicts of what had been a kind of inter-Arab cold war. Egypt, after all, was officially a socialist state; Saudi Arabia was a traditionalist monarchy. "Nasser's revolution," says the same Lebanese scholar, "was replaced by the beginning of a moderate, middle-of-the-road nationalist Arab war."

Operation Spark. The political developments encouraged by Nasser coincided with momentous social changes taking place throughout the Arab world. A generation ago, Egypt did not even have free primary education; today there are more than 200,000 students in its universities. Twenty-five years ago the Arabian-American Oil Co. started a small school to teach Saudis to read and write well enough to take low-level clerical jobs in the company. Today Saudis with advanced degrees in economics and engineering have not only learned how to run their petroleum industry; as the West is finding to its discomfort, they also know how to conduct a policy of oil diplomacy and set off a run on the dollar on Europe's money markets.

A generation of Arabs has by now grown up in a society in which old class lines have gradually been eroded. At the time of the partitioning of Palestine, a gentleman in Egypt avoided manual labor to the point of rarely carrying his own briefcase. Students in the Arab oil cities would never work lest they disgrace their families (by suggesting that the family was in need of money) but would take jobs as dishwashers or bellhops while studying in Europe or the U.S. Many of these young intellectuals--the emerging elite of the Arab world--returned home imbued if not exactly with the Protestant work ethic then with a determination to transform the stratified societies from which they came.

Anwar Sadat inherited this process and made it his own. He was frustrated by his troubles with the superpowers and by the Arabs' continuing divisions and limitations, and he was hampered by his own credibility gap: he could not mobilize the Arabs because none of them believed he was serious about doing so. In the end Sadat precipitated a war that he nicknamed Operation Spark--a desperate gamble that through adversity the Arab world might find its real strength.

The style of the operation, like Sadat's own, was one of unprecedented coolness and masterly deception. There had been rumors and intelligence reports of troops massing, but in the week before the attack all was calm; some soldiers, in fact, were demobilized to give the impression that fighting was not imminent. The period of Ramadan had begun, and President Sadat declared publicly that the authorities should see to it that the special foods for the season were available in abundant supply; at the time it sounded like the political gesture of a weak government rather than a call to arms.

The subterfuge began at the top. When the fighting started, Sadat's Economic Minister was off in London, his Commerce Minister was in Spain, his Information Minister was in Libya and his acting Foreign Minister was in Vienna. Obviously a great many things had happened to the Egyptians, including their ability to keep a secret.

Bungled Plots. T.E. Lawrence once remarked that the Arabs believe in people rather than institutions. To the extent that this is true, Egypt--and the rest of the Arab world as well--has suffered for the lack of a living hero since Nasser's death in 1970. Certainly, few Arabs at first noticed anything particularly charismatic about his successor.

The son of a military-hospital clerk in the Nile Delta, Sadat for much of his political life had seemed to be not much more than a devoted epigone of Egypt's beloved leader. In fact, he was somewhat the more impetuous and strong-headed of the two. During World War II, for instance, Sadat was jailed as a political subversive after the failure of two absurdly bungled plots to smuggle a former Egyptian general over to the Germans. First a getaway car broke down, then an escape plane crashed on takeoff. Along with two Nazi spies who were his accomplices, Sadat was betrayed by a belly dancer and arrested. Israelis frequently cite Sadat's pro-German sympathies during World War II as proof of his implacable anti-Jewish feelings. Actually, Sadat collaborated with the Nazis primarily because they were the enemies of his enemy: the British, who then occupied Egypt.

Sadat first met Nasser in 1938, when both men were lieutenants in the army. At the time, Sadat was a hothead who schemed and dreamed about blowing up British installations; Nasser was the cooler one who dissuaded him from such wild plots. With others, the two soldiers formed the nucleus of what became the Free Officers' Committee, which eventually ousted King Farouk in 1952. For all his antimonarchical zeal, Sadat almost missed the coup. On the night that it was scheduled to take place, Sadat somehow failed to receive his tip-off message and spent the evening at the movies. By the time he found out what was happening, Farouk's headquarters in Cairo had already fallen. Nonetheless, Sadat was selected to announce the overthrow on Cairo radio.

Neither then nor since has Sadat seemed like a typical revolutionary. A careful dresser who favors British blazers and tasseled loafers, he has long been an avid Ping Pong player. On a visit to the U.S. a few years ago, he wandered through secondhand bookshops and bought a set of the complete works of Zane Grey; his favorite author, he once said, was Lloyd C. Douglas (The Robe), whose novels he discovered while he was in prison. He lives with his attractive, half-British second wife, Gehan, and their four children in a comfortable house at Giza, a Cairo suburb.

Yes-Yes. Under Nasser, Sadat rose from director of army public relations to editor of the semiofficial Cairo newspaper al Gumhouriya to president of the National Assembly. Nasser valued his loyalty but sometimes called him the Bikbashi Sah (Colonel Yes-Yes) because of his excessive docility. "If he would only vary the way in which he agreed," Nasser was known to quip, "I would feel a lot better." But in the year before his own death, Nasser made Sadat his Vice President.

Sadat's first years as President were difficult ones. As a leader of his people, he was something of a comedown from Nasser. He had no single power base of his own. He clashed with some of his ministers and in 1971 summarily fired his powerful Vice President, Ali Sabry. Sadat also faced rising resentment from his officers over the presence of Soviet advisers. Moreover, as Arab frustration grew over the unresolved "no war, no peace" situation with Israel, Sadat had an unfortunate habit of promising action but never delivering. His "year of decision," 1971, passed uneventfully. "We do not shrink from any sacrifice," he declared last year when he shuffled his Cabinet and made himself Premier as well as President, but nothing happened. "The battle is now inevitable," he promised last spring, but hardly anyone believed him.

In hindsight, Sadat appears to have worked with remarkable singlemindedness over the past two years. In 1971 he signed a 15-year friendship treaty with the Soviet Union in the hope that it would lead to a resolution of the impasse with Israel; it did not. Last year, after the Soviet Union failed to give him the offensive weapons he wanted, he expelled some 17,000 Soviet advisers--reportedly on the advice of Saudi Arabia's King Feisal, who reasoned that this setback for the Soviet Union would lead the U.S. to pressure the Israelis into making a compromise on the occupied territories; it did not.

Last February Sadat sent his national security adviser, Hafez Ismail, on a peace mission to Washington and other capitals in an effort to break the diplomatic deadlock. That did not work either; hardly had Ismail left Washington when the U.S. announced that it was supplying Israel with 48 more Phantom jets; Sadat concluded that he could count on nothing from Washington.

Sadat had grown disillusioned with the peace initiatives advanced by U.S. Secretary of State William Rogers, said Sadat's press adviser, Dr. Ashraf Ghorbal, last week, because "it became obvious that the U.S. looked on the ceasefire as an end in itself, leaving Israel permanently in control of our territory." In the Egyptian view, Ghorbal told TIME Diplomatic Editor Jerrold L. Schecter, "we were made many promises, heard much about good intentions, were told sweetly to be patient [because] Israel will ultimately become convinced that it was in her real interest to solve instead of keeping the problem as a powder keg. But all this yielded to a later argument that we be realistic, that we were militarily defeated, that a partial settlement is better than nothing."

But within the Arab world Sadat was bringing about a new sense of fraternity, particularly during the past six months. He regained the support of King Feisal, who was said to feel chagrined that his advice to the Egyptian President about ousting the Russians had been mistaken. Libya's hotheaded strongman Muammar Gaddafi (TIME cover, April 2) wanted to unite with Egypt immediately; Sadat persuaded him instead to accept a gradualist approach to the merger (partly as a result, Gaddafi has sulked and done little during the current fighting).

Rightful Heir. The climax of Sadat's diplomatic maneuvering took place last month, when he met in Cairo with Syria's President Hafez Assad and persuaded him to join in a plan of limited war. The two leaders also staged a reconciliation with Jordan's King Hussein and accepted him as a limited partner in the coming battle; they apparently agreed, however, that Jordan was too vulnerable to Israeli airpower to warrant direct Jordanian intervention. The Palestinians were not directly involved in the planning, but Sadat announced that he favored the establishment of a Palestinian state. Both Hussein and Sadat then made gestures of friendship to the Palestinians in the name of Arab unity; Hussein released 970 political prisoners from Jordanian jails, and Sadat dropped charges against 200 dissident students and journalists.

Last week Sadat was directing the fighting from an office at army headquarters on the edge of Cairo, where he is residing for the duration of the war. A devout Moslem who has made the hadj (pilgrimage) to the holy places of Mecca, Sadat observed the strict Ramadan fast. Most days he napped from 4 until 6 in the afternoon, then worked late into the night holding operations meetings with his staff. He has a reputation for listening closely to his generals and of deferring to their expertise; but he makes the decisions himself.

At week's end the real question facing Egypt and the Arab world was the quality of those decisions. Did Sadat have a plan for stemming the Israeli advance from the canal? Would his people forgive him if, in the end, Egypt's armies were to suffer another battlefield defeat? No one could say. But for the moment he was his nation's hero and Nasser's rightful heir.

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