Wednesday, October 14, 1981
daily nebraskan
page 5
Sadat gambled and lost his life
The saddest thing about the death of Egypt's Anwar
Sadat is that it was such a waste.
It is impossible to know what mix of motives, religious,
political or personal, inspired his assassins. But it may not
be overstating the cause to say that what cost Sadat his
life - and the things that willTnake the world miss him
most - was his historic gamble for peace.
Sadat understood as well as anyone that the barrier to
peace in the Middle East was always psychological: a
melange of bitterness that the world seemed to care too
little when the Nazi Holocaust claimed the lives of six
million Jews and of guilt that too many Jews went too un
resistingly to their deaths. The Israeli psychology is cap
sulized in the phrase: "Never again."
todOOsjD raspberry
Sadat understood as well that the Palestinians, who had
no part in the Holocaust and who cared nothing about the
psychological scars it left on the Jews, were equally bitter
and guilt-ridden that they had been misplaced, also too
unresistingly, by the establishment of the Jewish state.
This psychological standoff, Sadat knew, was incapable
of military resolution. What was needed was a psychologi
cal breakthrough. Sadat provided the opportunity for just
such a breakthrough with his unprecedented 1977 visit to
Israel.
It was a masterful gesture which said, in effect: "Let us
put our psychology behind us and agree to make peace."
It seemed for a while that the gamble might work. But
the Camp David peace talks engineered by then-President
Jimmy Carter fell short of Sadat's dream. It was the
Egyptian's notion that if he and Israeli Prime Minister
Menachem Begin could agree to make peace, it would
mark the beginning of a generalized peace between Israel
and its Arab neighbors.
Ironically, until shortly after Sadat's statesman-like
gesture, it was the Israelis who were insisting that the
barriers to peace were psychological: that the problem
was the refusal of the Arabs, specifically the Palestine
Liberation Organization, to accept the legitimacy of
Israel's existence. Sadat's move could have swept away
this deadly psychology, if only there had been a comple
mentary grand gesture from Begin. It never came.
Instead of accepting Sadat's statesmanship as an effort
to cut the Gordian knot of fitter history, the Israeli leader
treated it as the opening gambit in a round of ordinary
negotiations: Negotiations which, for all the hoopla that
surrounded each petty point of agreement, in fact got nowhere.
As a result, Sadat, instead of becoming a,leader of his
Arab brothers, became isolated from them as a man who
had dared make peace with the mortal enemy. He was
viewed by them as a traitor and a fool, and he was, almost
from that moment, a dead man.
Israel, if it had seized the opportunity, could have
saved him or at least could have saved and institutional
ized the peace process. As it was, the peace effort, from
the Arab side, was embodied in the person of Sadat. And
with his death, both sides are far worse off than before.
It was easy enough to understand why Israel was un
willing to enter into a gamble of the magnitude of Sadat's.
The far-more-numerous Arabs could lose militarily again
and again and still survive. For Israel, a series of military
victories could only buy time; a single defeat would be
fatal
The other side of that somber fact, though, is that
Israel could never save itself through military might but
only through peace with its neighbors. Sadat tried, and
failed to make that peace.
Sadat laid everything on the line: his personal and
political prestige, his credibility and his life. If Israel had
joined in the gamble - if even a few of the Arab chiefs
of state could have seen that it was in their overwhelming
self-interest to become party to the search for peace
Sadat's gamble could have changed the course of Middle
East history for all time.
They didn't. Sadat has died a wasted death, and
business in that strife-torn part of the world will go
tragically on as usual.
(c) The Washington Post Co.
(yOw neforasEiasi
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