The Arabs: A History

In January 1977, Sadat was giving an interview to a Lebanese journalist in his vacation home in the town of Aswan on the upper Nile. The journalist broke off her questioning as a column of thick smoke rose from the center of the town. “Mr. President,” she said, “something strange is happening behind you.” Sadat turned and saw fires in Aswan and a mob crossing the bridge over the Nile toward his house. Sadat had just ordered the cash-strapped Egyptian government to lift a number of І crucial subsidies on bread and other staples. Egypt’s poor saw their subsistence placed in jeopardy and rose in nationwide bread riots that left 171 dead and hundreds injured before the subsidies, and calm, were restored.51 Something strange indeed was happening behind Sadat. The Egyptian public, who once hailed him as the “Hero of the Crossing” for Egypt’s successes on the Suez Canal in the October War, were losing confidence in their president. Sadat did not have Nasser’s charisma or mass appeal. He needed to deliver on his promises of prosperity or face deposal. Sadat grew increasingly convinced that prosperity could only be achieved through American support?and peace with Israel. In the immediate aftermath of the 1973 War, Sadat had leveraged Egypt’s credible military performance and the successful deployment of the Arab oil weapon to secure U.S. support for a partial Israeli withdrawal from the Sinai. U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger initiated his signature shuttle diplomacy, making frequent negotiating trips between Cairo and Jerusalem to secure the two Sinai Disengagement Accords (January 1974 and September 1975) that restored both the Suez Canal and some of the Sinai oil fields to Egypt. The recovery of the Suez Canal was a major accomplishment for Sadat, first because he had succeeded where Nasser had failed—in ensuring the canal did not become the de facto boundary between Egypt and Israel—and second, because the canal was a major revenue source for cash-strapped Egypt. With American assistance, the Egyptians cleared the wrecks of ships destroyed in the course of the Arab-Israeli War of 1967 from the canal, and on June 5, 1975, Sadat reopened the strategic waterway to international shipping. The first ships to exit the canal were some of the fourteen vessels of the “Yellow Fleet,” a group of international steamers trapped in the Great Bitter Lakes by the 1967 War that had spent eight years gathering the yellow dust for which the fleet was named. Though Egypt celebrated these gains, the Sinai Accords left Israel in control of most of the Sinai Peninsula (Egyptian territory occupied by Israel in the Six Day War) and the Egyptian treasury still struggling to make ends meet. Sadat was growing increasingly desperate for new funds for his treasury, and he revealed a willingness to turn against his Arab neighbors to reinforce his own position. In his desperation to increase Egypt’s revenues, in the summer of 1977 Sadat attempted to seize oil fields belonging to Libya. According to contemporary estimates, Libya generated some $5 billion in oil revenues each year, a vast sum for a population that was a fraction the size of Egypt’s—protected by an army that was also a fraction the size of Egypt’s. In a moment of mad opportunism, Sadat considered the Soviet arms deliveries to his wealthy neighbor a pretext to invade—as though the Libyan arsenal represented a threat to Egypt’s security. Sadat withdrew his forces on the Israeli front in the Sinai to attack the Libyans in the Western Desert on July 16. The Egyptian air force bombed Libyan bases and provided air cover for the invasion of Libya. “Almost immediately it became clear that Sadat had miscalculated,” veteran analyst Mohamed Heikal recalled. “Neither the [Egyptian] public nor the army saw any logic in disengaging forces with an enemy, Israel, only to attack an Arab neighbour.” The Egyptian attack on Libya went on for nine days. Egyptian public was unenthusiastic, and Washington was openly hostile to Egypt’s unprovoked aggression. The U.S. ambassador in Cairo made clear Washington?s opposition to any invasion of Libya, and Sadat was forced to back down. On July 25, Egyptian troops withdrew from Libya, bringing the conflict to an end. ?Thus it was,? Heikal concluded, ?that the food riots in January and a botched foreign adventure . . . led Sadat to the conclusion by mid-1977 that Egypt would have to negotiate a new relationship with Israel.? 52 If Sadat failed to increase his revenues, he would face further food riots. He could not secure the funding from his Arab brethren—by persuasion or coercion. Yet by being the first Arab state to conclude peace with Israel, Egypt could attract substantial U.S. development aid and foreign investment. It was a high-risk strategy, given Arab intransigence toward Israel. Yet Sadat had taken high risks before and succeeded. The obstacles to peace with Israel had never appeared higher. In May 1977, Menachem Begin led the right-wing Likud Party to victory, shattering the Labour Party’s monopoly of government since the founding of the state of Israel. Under Begin’s leadership, the Likud Party was committed to establishing Jewish settlements to retain the Arab territories Israel occupied in the June 1967 War. It would be hard to imagine a more intransigent negotiating partner than the ex-terrorist proponent of Greater Israel. And yet it was Begin who made the first contact, sending conciliatory messages to the Egyptian president through King Hassan II of Morocco and Romanian president Nicolae Ceausescu. The latter persuaded Sadat that “a peace treaty would have been impossible with Labour in power and Begin in opposition, but with the roles reversed the prospects were better,” for the Labour Party was less likely to stand in the way of a peace deal with Egypt.53 Sadat returned to Egypt and began to contemplate the unthinkable: direct negotiations with the Israelis to secure an Arab-Israeli peace treaty. He had demonstrated Egypt’s military leadership in the October War and would secure Egypt’s leadership over the Arab world by leading the peace. Just as his generals had been resistant to making war with Israel when he first broached the subject in 1972, so he knew his politicians would resist his peace plans. He would need to reshuffle his political team and bring in some new talent less resistant to change. He chose a complete outsider to help plan his peace campaign.

Boutros Boutros-Ghali (b. 1922) was a professor of political science at Cairo University. His grandfather had served as prime minister and his uncle as foreign minister under Egypt’s monarchy. Members of the landed aristocracy, the Boutros-Ghali family saw their agricultural estates confiscated by the new government’s land reform measures following the 1952 revolution. In a country that was overwhelmingly Muslim, Boutros-Ghali was a Coptic Christian and his wife a member of a prominent Egyptian Jewish family. Yet these very qualities, which had marginalized Boutros-Ghali from Egyptian politics since the 1952 revolution, now recommended him for government service when Sadat decided to attempt a peace settlement with Israel. On October 25, 1977, the professor who would later become secretary-general of the United Nations was astonished to learn that he had been appointed minister of state in a cabinet reshuffle. Shortly after entering government, Boutros-Ghali attended Sadat’s November 9 speech to the People’s Assembly, in which the president first intimated his willingness to work with Israel. “I am ready to travel to the ends of the earth if this will in any way protect an Egyptian boy, soldier, or officer from being killed or wounded,” Sadat told the legislators. Speaking of the Israelis, he continued: “I am ready to go to their country, even to the Knesset itself and talk with them.” Boutros-Ghali recalled that PLO chairman Yasir Arafat, who attended the session to hear Sadat’s speech, “was the first to burst into applause at these words. Neither Arafat nor my colleagues nor I understood the implications of what the president had said.” None of them had a clue that Sadat actually contemplated imminent travel to Israel.54 But one week later, Boutros-Ghali understood the full significance of Sadat’s words, when the then vice president Hosni Mubarak asked him to draft the outline of a speech “that the president will give next Sunday—in Israel!” Boutros-Ghali was excited to find himself “at the heart of this historic event.” As Sadat expected, many of his politicians rejected his plans. Foreign Minister Ismail Fahmi and Muhammad Riyad, the minister of state for foreign affairs, both resigned rather than accompany Sadat to Jerusalem. Two days before Sadat was scheduled to depart, Boutros-Ghali was appointed acting foreign minister and invited to join the presidential delegation to Jerusalem. His friends warned him not to go. “The fear in the air was palpable,” Boutros-Ghali recalled. “The Arab press was vicious. No Muslim, they wrote, would agree to accompany Sadat, so he chose the Christian Boutros-Ghali, who has a Jewish wife.”55 Yet the new acting foreign minister found himself “attracted by the extraordinary challenge” of shattering the taboos set out in the 1967 Khartoum Summit, which had bound all Arab states to a common position of no recognition of the Jewish state, no negotiation with Israeli officials, and no peace between Arab states and Israel. The Egyptian president a