Sadat Shouts an Angry No

"Peace cannot be built when a country treads on the land and sovereignty of another . . . When the Israeli Foreign Minister says we can sit and negotiate and go halfway, I answer: Halfway is, for us, to lose our land and our sovereignty. No!"

--Egyptian President Anwar Sadat

"Any Israeli Premier who compromises on the settlements would have to resign . . . Israel's Arab neighbors are implacable enemies. Egypt is an implacable enemy." --Israeli Premier Menachem Begin

So much for the "spirit of Jerusalem." In a mood of cold fury, the Egyptian President last week abruptly broke off the political talks in Jerusalem between his Foreign Minister, Mohammed Kamel, and Israeli Foreign Minister Moshe Dayan and ordered the Egyptian delegation home. Scarcely two months earlier, Sadat had dramatically transformed the politics of the Middle East with his "sacred mission" to Israel. That venturesome act, as Sadat himself conceded, involved the risks of failure. By calling Kamel home, the Egyptian President had transformed the area's politics again, but this time for the worse: if the talks broke off--considering the heated atmosphere on both sides--it would take an extraordinary diplomatic effort to get them started again.

U.S. officials were left stunned by the week's events. President Carter described the breakdown in the talks as "very serious" but still insisted that "the prospect for peace, compared with a year ago, is quite good." Secretary of State Cyrus Vance also said that the peace talks were not "dead" but added sadly: "It's obvious we have hit a bump in the road." Vance, who had served as the essential mediator between the Israeli and Egyptian Foreign Ministers during the talks, flew from Jerusalem to Cairo after Kamel's walkout, in a futile effort to get the negotiations going again. He found an enraged Sadat obsessed with Begin's "arrogance" and what he regarded as Israeli intransigence.

At week's end Sadat gave a tough speech before the Egyptian parliament, in which he emphasized that the peace talks had collapsed because Israel refused to express its willingness to withdraw from Arab territory. Sadat acknowledged that the Israeli people had shown "in the most unmistakable human manner" their desire for peace, but he accused their government of deceit and said he had threatened war if Israel insisted on keeping its settlements in the Sinai (see box). "I will not allow a single settlement," Sadat said he told Israeli Defense Minister Ezer Weizman last month, "even if this requires that I fight you to the ends of the earth. " Sadat praised the U.S., and said he would ask Washington to provide Egypt with a military arsenal as large and as sophisticated as the one it has provided Israel--not so Egypt could launch an attack on the Israelis, "but because the arsenal they have allows them to be so arrogant." On Sunday, after a meeting of his cabinet, Begin announced that in retaliation Israel would not send a delegation to the military talks, which were scheduled to resume in Cairo this week.

What had gone wrong? There had been forebodings for several days that the peace initiative was running into serious trouble. In two interviews on the eve of the Foreign Ministers' conference, Sadat had predicted that there was "absolutely no hope" of reaching an agreement. When the two sides began quibbling over how to word the Palestinian issue on the agenda, Vance briefly delayed his trip to Jerusalem as a signal to the Israelis and the Egyptians that they had to work harder on a compromise. The agenda problem was settled when the Israelis agreed to define the subject, as the U.S. had suggested, in strictly geographical terms--namely, the future of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. The following evening, however, Begin warned 15 visiting American Congressmen that Israel had no intention of giving up its settlements in the Sinai; the Congressmen were surprised by both his language and his vehemence.

Neither Foreign Minister helped matters. Arriving in Jerusalem, Kamel declared there could be no peace as long as Israel occupied Arab land, including the Golan Heights and East Jerusalem, and the Palestinian people were denied the right of self-determination. "Time is of the essence," he said, "so let us invest it to the maximum and not just see it slipping through our fingers." Later that day, Dayan told a press conference that Kamel's statement was like "holding a pistol to our heads" and the Egyptian should take such statements "back to Cairo with him." Thus even before Vance and the Foreign Ministers had taken their places around a doughnut-shaped table (its hole in the center decorated with three potted palms) in a ballroom of the Jerusalem Hilton, it was clear that the euphoria generated by Sadat's visit had all but evaporated.

The most hostile incident, and the one that may well have roused Sadat's ire beyond control, occurred at a dinner given by Begin for his Egyptian and American guests. Both the Israelis and the Egytians had privately agreed in advance that they would leave polemics aside for this occasion. The U.S. delegation--but not the Egyptians--were warned in advance that Begin might deliver a tough toast, and he most certainly did. His ten-minute speech turned into a near tirade as he insisted that Israel would not go back to the "fragile, breakable, aggression-provoking and bloodshed-causing lines preceding the fifth of June 1967." With mounting fervor, Begin turned to the subject of self-determination for the Palestinians. "That wonderful concept of self-determination," he said, "was misused in the late '30s, and as a result of that concept, disaster was brought upon Europe, upon the world ... May I state: let never again that concept be misused, because we remember the late '30s and the result of that misuse." As his listeners understood, Begin was comparing the Palestinian claims to the West Bank with those of Nazi Germany on the Sudetenland, a predominantly German portion of Czechoslovakia, in the late 1930s--an analogy that was as undiplomatic as it was contrived.

The Premier went on to describe Kamel as "young" in comparison with Vance and himself, which the Egyptians interpreted as a patronizing reference to the fact that Kamel was named Foreign Minister only a month ago. (Kamel, a former ambassador to West Germany, is 51; Vance is 60, and Begin 64.) Begin closed the toast by raising his goblet of apple juice* and saying, "L'chayim" (To life). Kamel's response was brief and barely civil. "I thought we were going to have a sort of relaxed and social event tonight," he said. "I think the place to discuss these matters is in the meetings that will start tomorrow." He barely raised his glass. The temperature of the banquet hall seemed to drop 20DEG.

The next day, however, Vance's efforts at behind-the-scenes negotiation apparently began to pay off. The formal closed meeting at the table lasted only 23 minutes; the center of action was the Vance suite on the Hilton's 14th floor. There the Secretary talked alternately with Dayan and Kamel in a latter-day version of the "proximity talks" that used to characterize Arab-Israeli discussions. The negotiators were concentrating on the first agenda item: achieving a declaration of principles that would form the framework for an eventual settlement between Israel and the various Arab states. This declaration was regarded by Sadat as vital to the process; once an agreement on the framework had been reached, he hoped to be in a position to invite other Arab countries, especially Jordan and Syria, to join the talks.

Early that evening, State Department Spokesman Hodding Carter III gave an optimistic briefing in which he assured newsmen that there was "no crisis, no deadlock, no breakdown." Things were going so well, he added, that the two sides might agree on the declaration of principles before Vance's scheduled departure for Cairo on Friday. Egypt and Israel appeared to be in agreement on provisions calling for territorial integrity, respect for sovereignty, ending the state of war and establishing normal relations among all states in the area; there remained the issues of Israeli withdrawal and Palestinian self-determination to be compromised somehow. As a group of reporters left the U.S. briefing and got on an elevator, another journalist stepped in and told them the Egyptians were going home immediately. Said one shocked newsman: "I felt as if I had 'walked through Alice's mirror."

Quickly the news spread that Cairo Radio had broken into its regular broadcast at 6:40 p.m. to announce that Sadat was calling his delegation home, in order to break the "vicious circle" into which the negotiations had fallen. Kamel, plainly as surprised as everyone else, claimed it was "quite natural" for him to return to Cairo to "report to my President." He called on Begin and remained for almost 90 minutes. Later, at about midnight, he was accompanied by Dayan to Ben Gurion Airport, where, curiously enough, the two Foreign Ministers talked for more than two hours. It was nearly 3 a.m. before Kamel climbed aboard his white-and-gold Egyptian jetliner for the flight to Cairo.

With the breakoff of the talks, the rhetoric on both sides escalated. Announcing Sadat's recall of his delegation, Egyptian Information Minister Abdel-Moneim Mahmoud el Sawi said: "The fact that the Jews have been scattered around the world should not be a reason for the Palestinians to suffer the same fate." The Egyptian press began referring again to the Israelis as "black marketeers" and "Shylocks," and a government statement said, "Cheating, maneuvering and blackmail was Israel's style during the talks."

The night after Kamel went home, Begin gave a speech in which he denounced as "chutzpah" Sadat's insistence that the Jerusalem government should make concessions to the Arabs because Sadat had recognized Israel's right to exist. "We have existed, my dear Egyptian friends, without your recognition for 3,700 years," Begin declared. With great inaccuracy, he added: "We never asked your President or your government to recognize our right to exist." That outrageous comment may have angered Sadat more than anything else that Begin has said or done in the past two months. Reports TIME Cairo Bureau Chief Wilton Wynn: "Sadat feels he risked the hostility of the entire Arab world by going to Jerusalem and publicly welcoming Israel 'to live among us in peace and security.' Now it seems to Sadat that the Israeli Premier is trampling on the greatest gift Sadat could offer him."

In Washington, high-level U.S. officials were more irritated by Begin's performance than by Sadat's decision to break off negotiations. Some Administration officials complained that the peace package Begin had presented to Sadat was not quite the same as the one he discussed with Carter in Washington last month. According to these White House sources, Begin said nothing to the President about maintaining an Israeli military presence in the Sinai after a peace agreement. Nor did he say that Israeli settlements in the West Bank would remain under Israeli protection. He saved those points for Sadat--and then asserted that they had Carter's backing, which they did not. The circumstance was reminiscent of Begin's first trip to the U.S. last summer, when he met with Carter for two days and never mentioned his intention of legalizing a number of hitherto unsanctioned Jewish settlements in the West Bank, which he went home and immediately did. As one Washington observer put it: "Apparently with Begin, if you don't ask the right questions, you don't get the right answers."

Despite the clarifications Sadat offered in his Saturday speech to the Egyptian parliament, speculation continued on what his real motives were. Theories ranged from the emotional to the strategic. The Israeli maneuvering over the agenda and Vance's threat to postpone his trip indicated that all parties were involved in an intensely serious form of high-stakes diplomatic poker. Sadat was obviously not only putting pressure on the Israelis, but on the Americans to put more pressure on the Israelis. He was also signaling to his fellow Arabs that Egypt was not interested in a separate peace. But observers in Jerusalem did not discount Sadat's visceral reaction to Begin's ill-timed toast.

Yet if Begin miscalculated the impact of his speech, Sadat may have misunderstood the dynamics of the Jerusalem conference. As is his custom in times of crisis, the Egyptian President had canceled all appointments and interviews and gone into seclusion at the Barrages, one of his many homes near Cairo. The reports from his Foreign Minister were presumably pessimistic during the first two days of the talks. By the third day, the negotiations were beginning to produce some encouraging results, but Kamel might not have had a chance to report to his President on the day's progress. Thus Sadat may have acted on the basis of inadequate information, and then found he could not reverse his course without losing both face and credibility.

Whether or not that theory was correct, it was clear that there had been, as one U.S. official put it, "a massive failure in communications." In the euphoric wake of Sadat's sacred mission, the Egyptians may have lost sight of the fact that Begin, as a parliamentary leader responsible not only to his Cabinet but to public opinion, is under pressure not to sacrifice too much too quickly. Moreover, Sadat's comforting words in his speech to the Knesset last November could not overcome the ingrained Israeli belief that true peace can only be ensured by treaties that provide for militarily secure borders.

An old Zionist warrior, Begin can seldom resist the chance to give friend and foe alike an extemporaneous lecture on his deep feelings for the Jewish people and their history of suffering. The Premier miscalculated the wounding impact in Cairo of his public statements last week. The Israelis, who in negotiations frequently seem obsessed with detail, failed to understand that Sadat was interested primarily in signs of a new spirit in the discussions and not in the minute particulars of a document. The Israelis also displayed little understanding of Sadat's problem within the Arab world. The Egyptian President felt he was the injured party in last week's bickering. He had run out of concessions, he told colleagues. What worried him was that the Israelis did not seem to understand that after having made the enormous concession of going to Israel, he could not give any more on Sinai, the Palestinian issue or Jerusalem. If he did, he faced charges from his allies, particularly Saudi Arabia, which is currently giving him $2 billion a year in military and economic aid, that he was permanently splitting the Arab world and selling out his brethren.

From the beginning, Sadat had seen the conflict in terms of territory v. security: the Arabs would guarantee Israel's security, a thousand times over if necessary, if Israel would give back the Arab lands. In the end, he lost heart because he concluded that Begin was determined to have both security and a share of Arab territory.

Begin's motives are less easy to divine. He knows that Sadat is in no position to wage war; he knows that the peace initiative has made the Egyptian president vulnerable within the Arab world. Yet he has taken a rigid stand on the Sinai settlements--where only 3,000 Jewish pioneers live and which are hardly essential to the security of Israel.

Presumably Begin believes that if he bargains away the settlements in the Sinai, he will make it harder for Israel to retain other Jewish settlements in the West Bank, Gaza and the Golan Heights. But he must also realize that to remain adamant on so marginal an issue as the Sinai settlements carries enormous risks. It could destroy Sadat, the Arab leader who told the Israelis two months ago, "We really and truly seek peace." It could also lead to a fifth Middle East war. In behalf of the old goals and the old rhetoric, Menachem Begin seems prepared to court such risks; whether his people agree is not yet clear.

* To accommodate Orthodox Jews in the Israeli government, the meal was kosher; in deference to Muslim sensitivities, no alcoholic beverages were served.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.