President Anwar Sadat’s visit to Jerusalem, which is scheduled to take place this weekend, must be seen as a bold and personally courageous move by the Egyptian leader which will effectively throw the ball back into the Israeli court.
After months of haggling over procedural niceties, Sadat intends at one fell swoop to make the ultimate procedural concessions–by actually going to Jerusalem to meet face-to-face with Premier Menachem Begin. There will be no conceivable procedural quid pro quo that Israel could offer in return. The focus will shift to substance.
And Sadat will demand, before the court of world public opinion–and more especially American public opinion–a substantial concession from Israel in return for, and of the order of magnitude of, his own strikingly dramatic procedural concession.
This, in the opinion of some observers here, is the underlying purpose of Sadat’s new tactic. The battlefield is principally that of U.S. public opinion and the Egyptian President’s visit here has already earned him plaudits and admiration–even before it has taken place.
MAY WEAKEN ISRAEL’S POSITION
Most particularly, Israel’s off repeated thesis that the Arab states do not accept her existence in the area must needs suffer a heavy jolt once the telecasts of Sadat treading the red carpet at Ben Gurion Airport are beamed across the Atlantic.
Israel’s complaints over the years that the Arabs refused to sit and talk face-to-face and that this refusal in itself reflects their implacable hostility, will all but melt away. Sadat is sure to make these points and to relate them to Israel’s claim for territorial adjustments to ensure her security in the face of continued Arab implacability.
By demonstrating so trenchantly that such implacability can be transient, Sadat will be most cogently refuting the Israeli contention. He can be relied on to press the point home in his address to the Knesset and to link it to his dual demand for full withdrawal and for a Palestinian homeland.
Thus, for the first time since Defense Minister Moshe Dayan and U.S. Secretary of State Cyrus Vance drafted their “working paper” during the night of Oct. 5, the onus of stalling or moving forward will once again shift to Israel’s shoulders. The working paper, which the Arabs have found unpalatable, will fade into the background; after all, what are procedural niceties in the face of the historic gesture of Sadat’s visit to Jerusalem? And the core issues of substance will come to the fore. Sadat will make his demands, and it will be up to Israel to respond in such a way as not to foreclose further negotiations.
WILL AFFECT CHANCES OF RECONVENING TALKS
Observations by officials here and in Washington that the projected Sadat visit will not serve as a substitute for a reconvened Geneva conference ring hollow. It will not be a substitute but it will certainly affect the chances of a reconvening actually taking place.
If the visit ends in obvious deadlock, one can hardly see the conference thereupon resuming as though nothing had happened. Additionally, if there is that deadlock, the prospect of deterioration towards war will inevitably become much more real and ominous. Hence, Chief of Staff Gen. Mordechai Gur’s warning, though poorly timed, was by no means ill-founded.
The Sadat visit, which Abba Eban compared to the Weizmann-Feisal meeting of 1919 in historical importance, may perhaps have been conceived originally as something of a grand public relations exercise, designed to woo Western opinion. But as so often happens in the Mideast, diplomatic moves develop a momentum of their own as did President Nasser’s actions in April-May 1967. The visit could prove the determining factor in the region’s future, for peace or for war.
If it ends in success, or at least not in headon confrontation, it may open the road to fruitful peace negotiations. If it fails, it could turn out to be the catalyst of the next war. How will the Begin government react to Sadat’s demands to be voiced before the world from the Knesset podium? No one here is hazarding an answer to this fateful question.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
