Sadat Remembered - Reviled by Some, Praised by Others

Sep 16, 2003
Sadat Remembered - Reviled by Some, Praised by Others - for Making Peace With Israel at Camp David
By Donna Bryson - Associated Press Writer

CAIRO, Egypt (AP) - Anwar Sadat is certainly remembered in Egypt - both by those who spit out his name with anger and by those who accompanied him on his first steps toward peace with Israel a quarter century ago.
His opponents say the late Egyptian president's peace was their disaster - a betrayal of the Arab cause. But they can't ignore him. The treaty he signed with Israel endures and has reshaped the politics of the region.

On Sept. 17, 1978, after 12 days of negotiations brokered by President Carter at his Camp David retreat, Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin signed the blueprint for the first peace treaty between Israel and an Arab neighbor after four Mideast wars.

There has been no full-scale war since.

Sadat, who shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Begin, was assassinated in 1981 by fundamentalist Egyptian Muslim plotters angered in part by his overtures to Israel. His successor, Hosni Mubarak, has kept the peace. Ali Salem, an Egyptian writer and peace proponent, believes Sadat's legacy is assured.

Sadat "was a statesman and his role was not to reign only in Egypt, but to make something that would glimmer in history," Salem said.

Cairo has a subway stop and industrial zone named after him, and all of Egypt celebrates Sinai Liberation Day on April 25, the anniversary of Israel's final withdrawal from the peninsula as the peace treaty stipulated.

Osama el-Baz, now an adviser to Mubarak, traveled with Sadat to Israel in November 1977 on his epic journey of peace, wondering as they touched down whether the Israelis were "just playing games." Many of the Israelis waiting on the tarmac wondered the same thing about the Egyptians.

"But as time progressed, peace prevailed," el-Baz said.

Not, however, until the Americans plunged in. Begin and Sadat quickly deadlocked and Carter summoned them to the presidential retreat in Maryland to rescue the negotiations.

There too, things went so badly that the Egyptians wanted to give up and go home.

Hearing at one point of an impasse over troop deployment, Sadat "decided to barge in on the meeting. Everyone was a little bit surprised," M. Cherif Bassiouni, an Egyptian negotiator, said in a telephone interview from Chicago, where he heads DePaul University's International Human Rights Law Institute.

"Did we come here to make war or peace?" Bassiouni recalled a finger-pointing Sadat shouting at an Israeli negotiator. The Israelis backed down, and Sadat made his point to both sides: Egyptians and Israelis were no longer rivals, but partners intent on the same goal.

The following spring they signed a peace treaty on the White House lawn.

The idea that Arabs and Israelis can be partners, not enemies, is met with some skepticism today. The Camp David accords also called for resolving Israel's conflict with the Palestinians, yet Wednesday's Camp David anniversary finds Israeli-Palestinian tensions at a high after three years of violence.

Faried Zahran, then and now a leftist leader, remembers his anger at Sadat's peace efforts, and believes the present violence proves that Camp David was "unreasonable, unjust, unsuccessful."

El-Baz said he once hoped the Palestinians, Jordanians, Lebanese and Syrians would sign their own peace treaties with Israel within a decade of the peace with Egypt. If Jordan is the only one to have done so, he said, it's because the problems are complex, not because Sadat's vision was flawed.

Other negotiations have waxed and waned but the land-for-peace framework set out at Camp David has survived. The 22-member Arab League, which suspended Egypt for years because of its peace with Israel, last year adopted a peace plan offering Israel normal relations in exchange for full withdrawal from war-won lands.

The peace is much colder than what Sadat envisioned when he opened trade, tourism and diplomatic ties with Israel. Egyptians are appalled by what the Palestinians have endured and tend to put all the blame on Israel. Israelis are appalled by the anti-Semitic invective in the Egyptian media and tend to see it all as government-directed.

For defending Sadat's goals and visiting Israel, writer Salem is ostracized by fellow leftists. But he doesn't give up.

"We have now no war and no threats of war," he said. "It is a beginning. We have to go on the road. It is a long road."

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