Is there a statute of limitations for saying I told you so ? And can the dead say it?
I can imagine the late Egyptian president Anwar Sadat whispering those very words into the ears of Arabs and Israelis called to Annapolis later this month by the US administration for yet another round of peace talks.
The Annapolis gathering will take place – albeit unintentionally – almost exactly 30 years after Sadat shocked his countrymen and Israelis alike by boarding a plane on Nov. 19, 1977, to Israel. There he told its parliament, the Knesset, he wanted peace. The two countries had already fought four wars.
It was typical Sadat in its dramatic flair. After taking office in 1970, he reversed Egypt s alliances, scrapping his predecessor Gamal Abdel Nasser s close ties with the Soviet Union in favor of the United States. And it was typical of an Arab dictator in its unilateralism. The Egyptian people were certainly not consulted.
But Sadat s visit to Israel was visionary and bold – qualities increasingly missing among leaders of the Arabs and Israel over the past 30 years. Witness the leaders who will gather at Annapolis: Ehud Olmert, the weakest Israeli prime minister in decades; Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas, who controls just the West Bank, having lost the Gaza Strip to Hamas; and George W. Bush, on the last leg of his unpopular presidency, and the most disliked US president in a generation.
Arabs branded Sadat a traitor for that 1977 visit to Israel, and boycotted Egypt when, in 1979, he signed the first peace treaty between an Arab country and the Jewish state. Now, many of the Arab states that condemned Sadat have either made their own peace with Israel – such as Jordan – or are still trying, as is the case with Syria and Saudi Arabia.
And the Palestinians? Their late leader Yasser Arafat signed an interim peace deal with Israel in 1993, but fighting between rival factions on the anniversary of his death recently was a sad reminder the Palestinians need peace talks of their own.
For many of the past 30 years, it has been politically incorrect to criticize the Palestinians. The dream of Palestine continues to consume much of the region s political oxygen. But the Arab world has failed in not telling the Palestinians that they suffer as much from terrible leadership as they do from Israeli occupation. And now there is the astonishing civil war begun this summer in which the Islamist Hamas movement seized control of the Gaza Strip, leaving Abbas and his secular Fatah holding on in the West Bank.
Israel s continued occupation of Palestinian land and settlement expansion certainly erode prospects for peace. But what can possibly explain intra-Palestinian fighting that claims the lives of non-combatants at greater rates than those of Fatah or Hamas gunmen – and which at one point during the summer saw rival factions throwing men (suspected of belonging to the other faction) off rooftops?
Anwar Sadat s domestic and regional opponents accused him of wreaking havoc on Arab unity, thereby weakening the Arab position vis-à-vis Israel. But those same critics are silent on how poorly such Arab unity has treated the Palestinians. Witness the dismal status of Palestinians refugees in camps in Lebanon where they have few rights and cannot even leave the camps to work.
These problems hint at the many complexities – just from the Arab side – being brought to Annapolis this month, which is, coincidentally, in the state of Maryland, home to Camp David where Sadat and Israel s Menachem Begin earned a Nobel Peace Prize for holding Israeli-Egyptian peace talks with the prodding of Jimmy Carter. This Maryland success was a result of Sadat s venture to Israel and his speech to the Knesset.
That visit to Israel 30 years ago was the biggest gamble of Sadat s career and his death sentence. His peace overtures to the Jewish state were on the list of grievances of Muslim militant soldiers who assassinated him in 1981.
Hosni Mubarak, who has ruled Egypt since Sadat s murder, coaxed his country back into the Arab fold while keeping in place the peace treaty with Israel, albeit as a very low maintenance affair. Mubarak has said he is not against traveling to Israel in principle but does not want to go unless he is certain that it would push forward the quest for peace.
But under his tutelage, Egypt has lost much of its stature in that quest for peace. For years, it was the go-to country on the Middle East conflict simply because it was the only one that talked to both the Israelis and the Arabs. With Mubarak mostly mute, Saudi Arabia has stolen some of Sadat s thunder, recently hosting rival Palestinian factions and drawing up its own pan-Arab peace treaty for Israel.
Good ideas have been produced, but leadership is still required. It is not too difficult to imagine Sadat s spirit saying I told you so. Lean in and you might even hear him ask who dares to follow in his steps.
Mona Eltahawyis an award-winning New York-based journalist and commentator, and an international lecturer on Arab and Muslim issues. This article can be accessed at www.commongroundnews.org and Agence Global, agenceglobal.com.
