Arabs (82 page)

Yet Sadat was not to be deterred, and on November 19, with Boutros-Ghali in tow, he boarded a government plane for the forty-five-minute flight to Tel Aviv. “I had not realized the distance was so short!” Boutros-Ghali exclaimed. “Israel seemed as strange to me as a land in outer space.”
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After so many years of war and enmity,
it was as though the Egyptian people were looking at Israel as a real country for the first time. They had very mixed feelings. Veteran Egyptian journalist Mohamed Heikal captured the moment as Sadat emerged from his airplane at Lod Airport: “As television cameras followed him down the steps the guilt felt by millions of Egyptians was replaced by a sense of participation. Right or wrong, Sadat’s political and physical courage was beyond dispute. His arrival on forbidden territory enthralled many Egyptians and appalled the rest of the Arab world.”
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The following day, Sunday, November 20, 1977, Egypt’s President Anwar Sadat addressed the Israeli Knesset in Arabic (much to Boutros-Ghali’s chagrin, the English text on which he had worked so long was not used). This was exactly the bold gesture that Uri Avnery had always pressed the PLO to make—a gesture calculated to convince the Israeli public that there was an Arab partner for peace. “Allow me to address my call from this rostrum to the people of Israel,” Sadat said to the television cameras. “I convey to you the message of peace of the Egyptian people,” he declared, “a message of security, safety, and peace to every man, woman, and child in Israel.” Sadat went right over the heads of the Israeli lawmakers to exhort the Israeli electorate to “encourage your leadership to struggle for peace.”

“Let us be frank with each other,” Sadat continued to his audience both within and beyond the Knesset. “How can we achieve permanent peace based on justice?” Sadat made clear his view that for peace to endure, it had to bring a just solution to the Palestinian problem. “Nobody in the world could accept today slogans propagated here in Israel, ignoring the existence of a Palestinian people and questioning even their whereabouts,” he chided his hosts. Peace, he continued, was also incompatible with the occupation of other countries’ land. He called for the return of all Arab territory occupied in 1967—including East Jerusalem. In return, Israel would enjoy the full acceptance and recognition of all its Arab neighbors. “As we really and truly seek peace we really and truly welcome you to live among us in peace and security,” Sadat insisted.

Sadat’s visit to Jerusalem proved a remarkable diplomatic coup—it began the first serious peace process between Israel and its Arab neighbors. However, the road to peace proved long, arduous, and full of hazards. The Egyptians and Israelis came to the negotiating table with very different expectations. Sadat hoped to lead the rest of the Arab world to conclude peace with Israel, on the basis of a complete Israeli withdrawal from all territories occupied in 1967 and the establishment of a Palestinian state in East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip. Begin had no intention of making such concessions, and he undermined Sadat’s credibility within the Arab world when, in his response to Sadat at the Knesset, he asserted, “President Sadat knows,
as he knew from us before he came to Jerusalem
, that our position concerning permanent borders between us and our neighbors differs from his.”
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In the
course of their subsequent negotiations, Begin declared his willingness to restore most of the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt and most of the Golan Heights to Syria in exchange for a full normalization of relations, but he categorically refused to make concessions to the Palestinians.

Israel’s position on a comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace deal was far too restrictive to attract broader Arab involvement. Begin was intent on preserving Jewish settlements and retaining parts of occupied Syrian and Egyptian land for strategic reasons. The most the Israelis were willing to concede the Palestinians was a degree of self-rule in Gaza and the West Bank, which Begin consistently referred to by the Biblical names of Judea and Samaria. The Israelis refused to meet with the PLO, and there was no question of Palestinian independence, or statehood, or of Israel returning any part of Jerusalem, which the Knesset had declared the eternal, indivisible capital of the Jewish state (which claim has yet to gain international recognition).

Having embarked on his bold peace initiative, Sadat found himself caught between intransigence on both the Arab and the Israeli sides. None of the Arab rulers was inclined to follow Egypt’s lead, and Prime Minister Begin gave them little incentive to do so. He was convinced that peace with Egypt was in Israel’s strategic interests, for no other Arab country would be able to mount a credible threat to the Jewish state without Egypt. Peace with other Arab states was a secondary priority, and he was unwilling to make any concessions that might draw them into serious negotiations. Sadat was left to go it alone in negotiating with Israel against widespread Arab hostility.

U.S. president Jimmy Carter exerted every effort to shepherd the beleaguered Egyptian-Israeli initiative toward peace. He convened a meeting at the presidential retreat in Camp David, Maryland, in September 1978. Once again, Boutros Boutros-Ghali was in the Egyptian delegation. Flying with Sadat to the Camp David meeting, Boutros-Ghali listened to the Egyptian president’s game plan with mounting concern. Sadat naively believed he could win over American public opinion to Egypt’s negotiating position, that President Carter would take his side and force the necessary concessions from Israel to deliver what Sadat wanted. Boutros-Ghali did not think it would prove so simple. “I feared that the Americans would not pressure Israel and that Sadat would then make concessions.”
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Sadat was not entirely wrong. Egypt’s position enjoyed wide support in the United States, and President Carter did exert tremendous efforts to force concessions from Prime Minister Begin. It took thirteen days of bitter negotiations and twenty-two drafts before Carter brought the two sides to agreement. Begin agreed to retreat from the whole of the Sinai (where he had planned to spend his retirement); however, Sadat was forced to make concessions as well. Crucially, the agreement did not secure Palestinian rights to self-determination. The framework document provided
for a five-year transitional period in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, an Israeli military withdrawal, and a freely elected self-governing authority in the Palestinian territories. However, it left open the final status of the occupied Palestinian territories to future negotiations between Egypt, Israel, Jordan, and the elected representatives of the Palestinian territories. And it contained no penalty for Israel’s failure to fulfill these commitments.

The new Egyptian foreign minister, Muhammad Ibrahim Kamil, resigned in protest of Sadat’s betrayal of Palestinian rights. Yet Sadat would not be deterred and went to Washington to sign the “Framework for the Conclusion of a Peace Treaty” in a formal ceremony at the White House on September 17, 1978.

The Arab world was appalled by Sadat’s decision to break ranks and pursue a separate peace with Israel. In November 1978, the Arab heads of state convened a summit conference in Baghdad to address the crisis. The oil states pledged to provide Egypt with an annual allocation of $5 billion for a ten-year period, to undermine any material incentive Sadat might have had in seeking peace with Israel. They also threatened Egypt with expulsion from the Arab League, and to move the league’s headquarters from Cairo to Tunis, should Sadat make peace with Israel.

Yet Sadat had come too far to be deterred by Arab threats. After six months of further negotiations, Carter, Begin, and Sadat returned to the White House lawn to sign the final peace treaty between Egypt and Israel, on March 26, 1979. After Egypt had fought five wars against Israel, the most powerful Arab state put down its sword. Without Egypt, Arabs could never prevail over Israel militarily. The Palestinians and the other Arab states would have to secure their national and territorial ambitions by negotiation. Yet the Arab states would never enjoy sufficient leverage to pressure an intransigent Israel to return their lands, nor would they forgive Egypt for breaking Arab ranks to secure its own territory at their expense. Through collective action, the other Arab states argued, the Arabs could have secured a better peace deal for all.

Immediately after the signing of the peace treaty in March 1979, the Arab states acted on their threats and severed ties with Egypt. It would take over twenty years for Egypt to return fully to the Arab fold. Sadat feigned indifference, but the Egyptian people, proud of their country’s leadership of Arab affairs, were shaken by their isolation. They watched in dismay as the colors of Arab states were struck from the flag poles of the Arab League headquarters and embassy buildings across downtown Cairo in 1979, and viewed with no less concern the Star of David raised over the new Israeli Embassy in Cairo, with the conclusion of full diplomatic relations in February 1980.

The Egyptian people were not averse to peace with Israel; they just did not want peace at the price of Egypt’s ties to the Arab world. Egypt and Israel were now at peace, but it brought little joy to the people of either country.

At the end of the 1970s, Arab-Israel peacemaking was overtaken by one of the most momentous events in modern Middle Eastern history. Though Iran lies outside the Arab world, the impact of the Islamic Revolution was felt across the Arab Middle East.

In January 1979, the American-supported shah of Iran was toppled by a popular revolution headed by Islamic clerics. The Islamic Revolution was one of the most significant events of the Cold War era, for it profoundly altered the balance of power in the Middle East as the United States lost one of its pillars of influence in the region. The Iranian revolution also had a profound impact on oil prices. In the turmoil of the revolution, Iranian oil production—the second largest in the world—had ground to a virtual halt. In the panic following the fall of the shah, global markets experienced the second oil shock of the decade. Prices nearly tripled, from $13 to $34 per barrel.

While consumers around the world suffered, the oil-producing states enjoyed a new age of prosperity. Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest hydrocarbons exporter, was the oil-rich state par excellence. Its revenues from oil rose from $1.2 billion in 1970 to $22.5 billion at the height of the 1973–1974 oil embargo. Following the second oil shock provoked by Iran’s revolution, Saudi revenues leaped to $70 billion in 1979—nearly a sixty-fold increase over the course of the 1970s. The other Arab oil producers, including Libya, Kuwait, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates, enjoyed similar rates of growth. The Saudis responded with the most ambitious public expenditure program in the Arab world, with annual spending on development leaping from $2.5 billion in 1970 to $57 billion in 1980.
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Yet Saudi Arabia, like the other oil states, lacked the manpower to realize its development objectives on its own and was forced to recruit labor from the rest of the Arab world. Egypt was the premier labor-exporting state, though Tunisia, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen, as well as the stateless Palestinians, were all active in Arab labor migration. In the course of the 1970s, the number of Arab migrant workers in the oil states rose from some 680,000 in 1970 to 1.3 million in the aftermath of the 1973 oil embargo, to an estimated 3 million by 1980. These Arab labor migrants contributed enormously to their national economies. Egyptian workers in the oil states sent home $10 million in 1970, $189 million in 1974, and an estimated $2 billion in 1980—a 200-fold increase in the course of one decade.

Egyptian sociologist Saad Eddin Ibrahim identified a “new Arab social order” that resulted from this exchange of labor and capital between oil-rich and oil-poor states. At a time of deep political divides, the Arabs were enjoying growing interdependence at the economic level. The new order was resilient enough to withstand inter-Arab hostilities: when Egypt went to war with Libya in the summer of 1977, none of the 400,000 Egyptian workers was expelled in retaliation. Such pragmatism prevailed even when Sadat broke Arab ranks to make peace with Israel; demand for
Egyptian manpower in the oil states only increased in the years following the Camp David Accords. As Ibrahim concluded, oil had made the Arab world more closely linked socioeconomically by the end of the 1970s than at any time in its modern history.
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The impact of the Iranian revolution went much further than just the oil markets. The fall of one of the longest-ruling autocrats in the Middle East, backed by one of the most powerful armed forces in the region and enjoying the full support of the United States, made Arab politicians sit up and take notice. Nervous Arab rulers began to consider Islamic parties within their own boundaries with growing concern. “Is there a risk that the Iranian revolution can spread to Egypt?” Boutros Boutros-Ghali later recalled asking an Egyptian journalist. “The Iranian revolution is a sickness that cannot spread to Egypt,” the journalist assured him.
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Iran is a Shiite state, he argued, whereas Egypt and the Arab states were overwhelmingly Sunni Muslim. And Egypt was protected from the contagion of Iran by another Islamic state—the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Events would soon prove the journalist wrong. Islamic politics would rise to challenge every political leadership in the Arab world in the coming decade—starting in Saudi Arabia.

The Islamic challenge to the Saudi Kingdom came on November 20, 1979, when a little-known organization calling itself the Movement of the Muslim Revolutionaries of the Arabian Peninsula occupied the Great Mosque of Mecca, the very nerve center of Islam. The leader of the movement called for the purification of Islam, the rejection of Western values, and the liberation of the country from the Saudi monarchy, which he accused of hypocrisy and corruption. The standoff lasted more than two weeks, with some 1,000 rebels holding Islam’s holiest shrine hostage. The Saudis were forced to send in their national guard to put down the rebellion. Official figures put the death toll in the dozens; unofficial observers claimed that hundreds were killed. The leader of the movement was captured and later executed, along with sixty-three of his followers, many of whom were from Egypt, Yemen, Kuwait, and other Arab countries.