Anwar Sadat

At the time of Nasser's death in 1970, Anwar Sadat was Vice President of Egypt, and under the constitution he succeeded to the presidency. As Vice President, he had been a mere functionary, and he was not expected to be more than an interim president, until a new political arrangement sorted itself out. "Dwarfed by Nasser, characterized by his obsequiousness, Sadat was the buffoon of Egyptian politics. Few thought he would survive more than a few weeks" (Mackey, 1992, p. 247).

Nevertheless, Sadat soon placed himself in firm command of the Egyptian governmental apparatus. Along with economic and other initiatives, he then turned to the problem of Israeli occupation of the Sinai Peninsula, which the Israelis had captured during the 1967 war. The military measures taken by Sadat prepared Egypt successfully to challenge Israel on the battlefield in 1973. Anwar Sadat's road to peace thus began, paradoxically, with war. Yet, it was precisely success in war that laid the groundwork for pursuing initiatives for peace.

From Sadat's point of view, and Egypt's, the 1973 war brought very mixed results. On the symbolic level -- always important in power politics -- it was an enormous and crucial victory. The Egyptian Army had successfully crossed the Suez Canal: the equivalent of a major river crossing in the face of the enemy, one of the most difficult of military operations. It had achieved tactical surprise against the vaunted Israeli Defense Force, and rolled t

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upied Palestinians are obvious. The effects on Israel and Israelis are nearly as severe, and by no means confined to casualties from sporadic attacks by Palestinian militants. The morale of the Israeli army and of Israeli society as a whole has been steadily, gradually degraded by the experience of occupation. One characteristic indicator is the increasing number of young Israelis who refuse military service, something that would once have been almost unthinkable. Another indicator is increasing emigration from Israel. Thus, by any purely rational analysis, Israel would be far more secure if the Palestinians were neighbors rather than subjects. Many Israelis, perhaps often a majority, have long been perfectly well aware of these facts. However, a substantial -- and fanatically determined -- minority of the Israeli public remains dead set against any withdrawal, for reasons bound up in Zionist ideology. The Sinai did not figure in that ideology; the West Bank is central to it. Among hardline Zionists, withdrawal from the West Bank is considered unacceptable on any terms. For this reason, hardliners have pushed forward with the settlement policy, at enormous expense, with the intent of creating "facts on the ground" --

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