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CAIRO: Pledging to go to the end of the world in search of peace, Egypt’s late President Anwar Sadat boarded a plane to Israel on November 19, 1977 to shake hands with his foes after four devastating Arab-Israeli wars.
Twenty-five years later, the journey Sadat began has ground to a shuddering halt.
In central Cairo, a man sells charcoal sketches of political leaders — but his Sadat portraits aren’t doing well these days, he says.
Only one picture of Sadat hangs on the whitewashed wall, flanked by a sketch of an angry Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian president, and dwarfed by four pictures of Sadat’s predecessor Gamal Abdel Nasser, the hardline hero of pan-Arab nationalists.
“Nasser pictures are much more popular than Sadat. I sell something like four times as many Nasser sketches,” he said.
For most Egyptians, the reason is obvious.
Ties between Egypt the Jewish state are frostier than ever since the neighbours signed a peace treaty in 1979, and the goal of a comprehensive peace in the volatile region remains elusive.
Arab anger at Israel is at a boil, not least thanks to continued Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory, a steady diet of government rhetoric and heavy media coverage of a Palestinian uprising which erupted in September 2000 after peace talks collapsed.
Even in Egypt, once seen as a beacon of hope for Arab-Israeli harmony, frustration is rife. With television stations beaming non-stop footage into every home of Israeli tanks bulldozing Palestinian towns, the vast majority of Egyptians have stopped viewing Israel as a partner for peace.
DASHED HOPES: While authorities have been able to keep protests largely under control in Egypt, anger at Israel and its US allies has led to violent demonstrations and sporadic anti-American attacks in various Arab countries, including Jordan — the only other Arab state which has a peace treaty with Israel.
Hassan Nafaa, the head of the political science department at Cairo University, said Egyptians were still glad the peace treaty spared them another war, but were now convinced Israel was an expansionist state that didn’t want peace.
“Hopes were high in 1977. Sadat raised people’s expectations to a very high level. But when people saw it wasn’t so easy, hopes came crashing down. We were at the top of the mountain, and crashed to hell, and we are in hell right now,” he said.
The mood is a far cry from the hopes Sadat expressed before his trip and in his memorable speech to the Israeli parliament or Knesset, which set the stage for full-fledged peace talks between the adversaries, leading to Israel’s withdrawal from Egypt’s Sinai peninsula, occupied in the 1967 war.
“I state in all seriousness that I am prepared to go to the end of the world — and Israel will be surprised to hear me tell you that I am ready to go to their home, to the Knesset itself...,” Sadat told Egypt’s parliament on Nov 9, 1977.
“When the bells of peace ring there will be no hands to beat the drums of war,” Sadat told the Knesset less than two weeks later in his dramatic speech on Nov 20.
Today, many Egyptians and Arabs accuse Sadat of abandoning the Palestinians by signing what they consider a “separate peace” with Israel, and some say Egypt’s treaty gave the Jewish state a free hand to invade Lebanon and step up settlements in Palestinian areas because Egypt was out of the equation.
Many say the treaty, so admired outside the Arab world, paved the way for today’s regional strife because they say Sadat misread Israel as willing to duplicate the land-for-peace swap elsewhere. A hero and a visionary to some, Sadat is reviled by others as the man who sold out to Israel. Two years after signing the treaty, Sadat was assassinated by Islamic militants.
“It (Sadat’s trip) was a failure in every sense. It lost the Arabs what (weapons) they possessed, weakened their position and took attention away from other choices. It didn’t give back rights to the Arabs and the Palestinians,” said Egyptian lawyer Montasser Zayat.
Some Egyptians say they had become so accustomed to peace they had all but forgotten the suffering and humiliation of their defeats by Israel.
At the Israeli Academic Centre, Kushner says the situation is at a low point, but far from desperate. He said relations had gone through ups and downs before, and there were indications that things were picking up.—Reuters
