The Modern Middle East (26 page)

On the diplomatic front, the war influenced Sadat in two ways. On the one hand, inebriated with his victory and assuming himself to be the new spokesperson of the Arab world, Sadat now felt powerful enough to pursue solo diplomacy based on what he considered to be prudent for Egypt and for other Arab states. But the conduct of what he proudly called “electric-shock diplomacy” only served to alienate him from his fellow leaders and soon resulted in the isolation of Egypt from the rest of the Arab world.
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The break started in 1974, shortly after Kissinger negotiated a disengagement agreement first between Egypt and Israel and then between Israel and Syria (on January 17 and May 29, respectively). The first Egyptian-Israeli disengagement agreement became known as Sinai I. This was followed by the signing of Sinai II in 1975, in which Egypt opted to settle on a separate agreement with Israel instead of holding out for a comprehensive peace settlement involving the other Arab parties as well—including the Palestinians—to which Israel was opposed.
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Sadat’s penchant for “going it alone” was reinforced by a second realization. As the war had dramatically shown, Israel could not be defeated on the battlefront. Even if the Arabs could mount effective attacks on Israel, they could not overcome Israel’s American patronage. The most effective way to reclaim the Sinai, in fact the only way, would be to negotiate with Israel and to do so with American support. On November 19, 1977, to everyone’s shock and surprise, Sadat flew to Jerusalem. His reason, as he wrote in his autobiography, was to prove to the Israelis unequivocally that he was serious about a lasting peace.
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It was only a matter of time before Egypt’s breach with the rest of the Arab world would become complete.

To his dismay, Sadat’s dramatic gesture failed to yield tangible results. Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in March 1978, lasting into the summer, did
not help Sadat’s position domestically or in the larger Arab world. In September 1978, U.S. president Jimmy Carter invited Sadat and Israeli prime minister Begin to the Camp David retreat to work on the peace process. The Camp David Accords resulted in an agreement over the phased withdrawal of Israeli forces from the Sinai, but it also led to the near-complete isolation of Egypt from the rest of the Arab world. In March 1979, when the final provisions of the accord were signed, Arab leaders met in Baghdad and agreed on the imposition of economic, diplomatic, and political sanctions on Egypt.
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Egypt, the self-ascribed leader of the Arab world, was now more isolated from its Arab brethren than ever before.

In addition to diplomatic initiatives, after the 1973 War Sadat embarked on a major economic reform program that came to be known as the
infitah,
or open-door policy. The main premise of the
infitah
was to liberalize the economy by attracting foreign investments and rolling back some of the state’s functions in relation to the economy. Talk of such economic reforms had circulated among the ruling elite since the beginning of Sadat’s presidency, but only after 1973 did the regime feel secure enough to actually enact laws aimed at reforming the economy.
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Moreover, the statist policies of the Nasser era had failed to turn the Egyptian economy around, and the diplomacy of détente that in the mid-1970s informed Egypt’s foreign policy further supported the liberalization thrust. Increasingly confident in his domestic base, Sadat further dismantled the Nasserist state by fostering the demise of the Arab Socialist Union in 1976–77. After briefly flirting with limited political liberalization, in 1978 Sadat oversaw the reestablishment of another corporatist party, this time called the National Democratic Party.
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In the end, neither the “victory” of the 1973 War nor the
infitah,
nor even the corporatism of the National Democratic Party, could save Sadat from his own vanity and the wrath of his people. By the end of the 1970s he had become increasingly authoritarian and intolerant of dissent. In 1979, residents of Cairo staged a number of demonstrations protesting the country’s deteriorating economy. Tensions rose throughout 1980 as the peace process went nowhere and as Egypt’s isolation from the rest of the Arab world grew deeper. In the opening weeks of 1981, following bloody sectarian violence between Muslims and Copts, some 1,500 Islamic activists were rounded up and arrested. Finally, on October 6, 1981, while reviewing a military march celebrating the anniversary of the 1973 War, Sadat was assassinated. The “Hero of the Crossing,” Nasser’s triumphant heir, was dead.

The war had equally profound consequences for Israeli politics. It demonstrated to the Israelis that they had succumbed to the same type of complacency that had characterized the Arabs before 1967. The “pulverizing
Syrian offensive” and the ease with which the Bar-Lev Line had fallen drove home for many Israelis the inherent vulnerability of Israel as a sovereign state. Moreover, just as had occurred in Egypt and Syria after 1967, the 1973 War set in motion a nationwide process of soul-searching.
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Many Israelis started to rethink their priorities, in relation to both their political leaders and the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. Insofar as political leaders were concerned, the old generation of founding fathers—that of Ben-Gurion, Levi Eshkol, and Golda Meir—was increasingly pushed to the sidelines, and a younger generation of leaders, best represented by Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Defense Minister Shimon Peres, came to the fore.
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Not surprisingly, the average age of ministers in Rabin’s cabinet was lower than that of any previous cabinets, and only seven of the nineteen ministers had served in previous administrations.
⁷⁵

The shock of the war did not bring about a meeting of the minds among the Israeli public over the questions of Palestine and the Occupied Territories. In fact, the previous rift between Israel’s “hawks” and “doves” became a chasm, and a new center-right political party, named the Likud (Unity), was formed. At the same time, many Israelis (three-fourths of those surveyed) thought that the idea of peaceful coexistence with the Arabs and the exchange of land for peace should at least be discussed publicly.
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Israel’s signing of the Sinai I and II treaties with Egypt was part of a larger formula aimed at strengthening the Israeli government’s hand in dealing with Syria. Prime Minister Rabin calculated that peace with Egypt would militarily neutralize Syria’s most powerful ally. Israel could then deal with Syria on its own terms, through either negotiations or confrontation.
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Rabin also firmly believed that Israel’s long-term security would be best served by relinquishing control over the Occupied Territories. But he was unwilling to engage in the necessary negotiations in the shadow of the 1973 War, since, he reasoned, the Arabs might take this as a sign of Israeli weakness.
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Not until 1993, exactly two decades after the 1973 War, did Rabin finally negotiate with the PLO over the status of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. By then, Israel’s position within the Occupied Territories and throughout the Middle East had become supremely powerful.

Ironically, the war also led to a hardening of the attitudes of Palestinians living under Israeli occupation in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. The post-1967 mood of resignation and despair was replaced by a newfound confidence and sense of the self. There was a gradual rise in passive, and at times even active, resistance to the authorities following the war, and the local atmosphere in the Occupied Territories changed noticeably.
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These
trends culminated in and were reinforced by the establishment of a Palestine National Front in August 1973, intended to act as a liaison between the PLO and the “national forces” in the West Bank and Gaza.
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The Israeli response was decisive and draconian, in turn fueling the vicious circle of violence and bloodshed that by the mid-1970s had become a feature of the Palestinian movement.

Israel’s heavy-handed treatment of the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories notwithstanding, the 1973 War appears to have greatly benefited the PLO, even though the PLO did not itself participate in the conflict. The post-1967 generation of Palestinians who had become active and dominant within the PLO were now gaining steady international recognition for the Palestinian cause and for their own leadership role within it. In October 1974, the Arab League’s summit meeting in Rabat, Morocco, endorsed a resolution that recognized the PLO as “the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people.” This was a significant victory for the PLO and a major setback for Jordan’s King Hussein, who did not officially relinquish his hopes of one day ruling over the West Bank until the late 1980s. In November 1974, the Palestine question was once again taken up by the United Nations, and Arafat was invited to speak to the General Assembly. “I appeal to you,” he implored the delegates, “to enable our people to establish national independent sovereignty over its own land.”
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Two weeks later, the UN granted the PLO observer status. The previous July, Moscow had invited Arafat for an official visit to the Soviet Union. Both the Palestinian cause and the Palestinian leadership were now beginning to gain widespread recognition and, more than ever before, respectability.

Another significant consequence of the 1973 War was the emergence of oil as a highly effective economic and diplomatic weapon. Even before the war, Arab oil producers had discussed the possibility of an oil embargo as a way of helping the Palestinian cause. In October 1973, they announced that they would cut their oil production by 5 percent a month until Israel withdrew from the Occupied Territories. In retaliation for the West’s support for Israel during the war, they instituted a further 25 percent production cut across the board.
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The embargo, which succeeded in bringing much of the industrial machinery of the West to a standstill, lasted until March 1974, by the end of which the price of oil had risen threefold. Crude oil, for example, was approximately $3.01 per barrel (pb) before the outbreak of hostilities. By the time the war ended, it was trading at about $11.65 pb, having at some point reached as high as $17 pb.
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Through a careful analysis of oil production data for the Middle East before and after the oil embargo, the political economist Giacomo Luciani
has argued that “the embargo was fictional” and that the Arab oil producers’
threat
to cut oil production was never actually put into practice.
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“Middle East oil production increased rapidly and steadily until 1974,” he claims. “It declined the following year because of the recession and the decrease in oil demand triggered by the increase in prices. In fact,
oil was never used as a weapon.
”
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The international (as well as domestic) implications of such enormous, sudden wealth were astounding. The Arab states, working through the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), had now acquired the ability to dramatically influence the economies of the advanced capitalist countries. Luciani questions the degree to which the fictitious oil embargo actually helped the long-term interests of Middle Eastern oil producers as reliable suppliers of a much-needed energy resource and trustworthy trading partners.
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Nevertheless, for a time in the late 1970s there did develop at least the appearance that the more conservative states of the Middle East, of which the shah’s Iran and Saudi Arabia were prime examples, were beginning to get the upper hand in influencing the course of regional politics. Ironically, the embargo signaled the ascendancy of America’s allies in the Middle East, joined by Sadat’s
infitah
Egypt, and the eclipse or at least the checking of the new progressive, revolutionary states (Libya, Algeria, and Iraq). In the mid-1970s, the United States, still recuperating from the dual fiascos of the Vietnam War and the Nixon presidency, eagerly looked forward to a new era of international stability and global détente. But, as the Iranians would have it, that hope would not be fulfilled.

By the end of the 1970s, the political landscape of the Middle East had shifted dramatically. The idea of Arab unity, once so compelling to millions of Arabs, was now all but dead, a mirage dispelled first by the unhappy marriage of Syria and Egypt and then by the unfolding of events after 1973. Even in those years when the chief proponent of the idea, Nasser, was alive, the whole project had been exposed as primarily a means for him to expand his influence over Syria and Yemen and elsewhere. There had hardly been a genuine attempt to unite the Arabs toward some progressive, revolutionary set of goals. Despite the appeal of Arab unity as an abstract idea among the Arab masses, in practice it had come to mean the personal and political aggrandizement of Nasser. Consequently, when Nasser died, the main impetus for Pan-Arabism died with him. Nasser did leave behind much younger protégés who sought to complete his unfinished unity project—first Libya’s Moammar Qaddafi and later Iraq’s Saddam Hussein—but none succeeded
even to the limited extent that Nasser had. For all the noise they made, Qaddafi and Saddam, like Nasser, were motivated more by their own immediate circumstances than by a genuine belief in the cause of Pan-Arabism. Spouting some rhetoric and putting that rhetoric into practice are quite different things.