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                                                                              ╚January 2, 1978

Man of the Year

Anwar Sadat: Architect of a New Mideast



With one stunning stroke he designed a daring approach to peace

   He called it "a sacred mission," and history may judge it
so. By the trajectory of his 28-minute flight from a base in the
Canal Zone to Tel Aviv's Ben Gurion Airport, Egyptian President
Anwar Sadat changed the course of Middle Eastern events for
generations to come. More emphatically than anything that has
happened there since the birth of Israel in 1948, his
extraordinary pilgrimage transformed the political realities of
a region blackened and embittered by impermeable hatreds and
chronic war. In one stoke, the old rules of the Arab-Israeli
blood feud no longer applied. Many of the endless hurdles to
negotiation seemed to dissolve like Saharan mirages. Not in
three decades had the dream of a real peace seemed more
probable. For his willingness to seize upon a fresh approach,
for his display of personal and political courage, for his
unshakable resolve to restore a momentum for peace in the Middle
East, Anwar Sadat is TIME's Man of the Year.

   "What I want from this visit," Sadat had told TIME Cairo
Bureau Chief Wilton Wynn during the historic flight that took
him to Jerusalem, "is that the wall created between us and
Israel, the psychological wall, be knocked down." The wall fell.
The astonishing spectacle was global theater -- the images
caromed off television satellites to viewers around the world.
In a wash of klieg lights, the Egyptian who had hurled his
armies across the Suez Canal in 1973 stood at attention next to
the old Irgun guerrilla whose name has been a dark legend to
Palestinian Arabs for 30 years. An Israeli military band played
first the Egyptian national anthem, By God of Old, Who Is My
Weapon, and then the Israeli Hatikvah. In a hushed, deeply
moving tableau, Sadat walked along the receiving line with
Israeli Premier Menachem Begin to greet the old and resolute
enemies: former Premiers Yitzhak Rabin and Golda Meir, Foreign
Minister Moshe Dayan, Ariel Sharon, "Israel's Patton," who
thrust Israeli armor deep into Egypt in the October War of 1973.

   Next day, fulfilling a vow he had made to himself, Sadat
prayed in Al Aqsa mosque in the Old City of Jerusalem, one of
Islam's holiest places. Then the son of Ishmael stood before
the sons of Isaac in the Israeli Knesset and formally declared
that the deep, violent enmity between them had somehow passed.

   Sadat's demands on Israel, in exchange for peace, were
tough and familiar: the return to Arab sovereignty of all
territory (including East Jerusalem) conquered during the 1967
Six-Day War; a homeland for Palestinians on the West Bank and
in Gaza. Yet far more important were the generous words of
acceptance that few Israelis ever expected to hear from an Arab
head of state, least of all in their own parliament.

   Said Anwar Sadat: "We used to reject you, true. We refused
to meet you anywhere, true. We referred to you as the 'so-called
Israel,' true. At international conferences our representatives
refused to exchange greetings with you, true. At the 1973 Geneva
Peace Conference our delegates did not exchange a single direct
word with you, true. Yet today we agree to live with you in
permanent peace and justice. Israel has become an accomplished
fact recognized by the whole world and the superpowers. We
welcome you to live among us in peace and security."

   What Sadat called the "electric shock diplomacy" of
Jerusalem was galvanic -- and he moved swiftly to make sure that
the good will created by his mission was not dissipated. Within
three weeks, Israeli diplomats and journalists were flying into
Cairo to attend -- along with a U.S. delegate and a United
Nations representative -- a pre-Geneva conference that Sadat had
convoked. Even though the two countries were still technically
at war, the Israelis found themselves welcomed with astounding
warmth and joy by Egyptians. Near Alexandria, the Defense
Ministers of Egypt and Israel met to discuss military maps. Now
Menachem Begin had proposals. They would talk, face to face,
said Sadat. Where? At Sadat's rest house near Ismailia. Each day
brought its swirl of events, its new initiatives, its new
improbabilities.

   The Middle East, of course, is strewn with the ruins of old
hopes for peace -- colonial commissions, the corpses of
assassinated mediators, United Nations resolutions signed but
unhonored. Despite the euphoric glow last week in Cairo and
Jerusalem, no one who has long watched the region's affairs was
likely to announce: "Peace is at hand." Anwar Sadat had headily
mixed statesmanship and showmanship, but that is a volatile
combination. The very headlong momentum that Sadat had forced
raised the question of whether he was practicing a durable
diplomacy.

   Initially, Washington feared that Sadat, by seizing the
diplomatic reins from the U.S., might be moving too far ahead
of events, too far away from the other Arab states that must be
nudged along if a meaningful peace treaty is to be signed. The
Administration was also concerned that Israel might not offer
enough in return, or that Sadat would jeopardize an over-all
Middle East peace by signing a separate Egyptian-Israeli accord.

   There were and are legitimate cautions. There is ample
truth in the cliche that those who ignore history are condemned
to repeat it. But it is also true that slavish adherence to past
precepts is the enemy of political creativity. Sadat's
extravagant gamble made it possible for all parties concerned
to think of the Middle East problem in a nontraditional way.
Courageously, he broke a pattern of stalemate and mutual
hostility between Israel and Egypt, the most populous and
politically powerful of Arab states. Sadat's countrymen welcomed
him home from his peacemaking voyage with ululations of joy, as
if he had led his legions to victory over their mortal foe.
Other Arabs were shocked, puzzled or silent. The Saudis, whose
oil wealth has helped keep Egypt from bankruptcy for the past
ten years, went quietly but cautiously along. He received too
the tacit support of Jordan's King Hussein. But radical
Palestinians denounced Sadat as a traitor and put a price on
his head. A so-called summit of Arab "steadfast states" in
Tripoli, convoked by Libya's Muammar Gaddafi, froze relations
with Egypt. Calling their bluff -- without Egypt defending the
southern front, another Arab war against Israel would be a
hopeless enterprise -- Sadat broke off relations with Syria,
Libya, Algeria, Iraq and South Yemen. His critics, said Sadat,
were "dwarfs."

   The Israelis, for their part, were impressed by Sadat's
imagination. They knew that he had called on them for a creative
response. They knew also the risks he had taken, risks that
would lead, if not to peace, then very possibly to war. If Sadat
did not succeed, he would lose all credibility within the Arab
world. He would be left with one option, and the Israelis knew
that the Egyptian President was fully prepared for that bloody
alternative. Said Henry Kissinger this week: "It will take a
monumental mess-up to derail Sadat's initiative. But if it
fails, there will be war."

   Whether or not that fifth Arab-Israeli war takes place
depends much on the flexibility and political acumen of Premier
Menachem Begin, whose own strength of character and sense of
purpose made Sadat's historic venture possible. It will long be
remembered that Sadat said he would go to Jerusalem to seek
peace. But it must not be forgotten that Menachem Begin said
"Come ahead." Together the two leaders made their extraordinary
compact: "No more war."

   To the surprise of Washington, if not to that of his
countrymen, Begin became Premier after his Likud coalition won
a narrow victory in last May's national election, thereby ending
29 years of Labor-led coalition governments. Many Israelis had
dismissed Begin as an aging, right-wing relic of their country's
fierce struggle for independence. But, though ailing with heart
trouble, Begin has responded actively to Sadat; he has
demonstrated a large sense of history and a determination to be
remembered as the man who brought peace to Israel.

   Nothing merited the world's attention in 1977, or captured
it more decisively, then events in the Middle East. But in
other areas too there were signs of hope, new initiatives well
undertaken. Early in his first, sometimes bumbling year as
President, Jimmy Carter launched his human rights campaign. At
home, the President's critics complained that the policy was
either naive or cynical, since the Administration made clear
that when it came to such allies as South Korea or the
Philippines, human rights would be secondary to U.S. strategic
interests. Abroad, the Soviets and other East-bloc nations
protested that Carter was interfering in the domestic concerns
of sovereign states. But Carter had struck a chord, and
throughout the year the sound would not be stilled. The campaign
focused world attention upon political thuggery, torture,
repression -- and there were reverberations. The Pinochet regime
in Chile belatedly sought to polish its discreditable image by
announcing that it was disbanding the country's notorious secret
police agency, DINA. In Iran, the Shah's hated secret police
organization, SAVAK, eased up somewhat on political dissidents.
In the Eastern bloc, the human rights campaign produced mixed
results, with a few gains for dissidents, but in some countries
an even more repressive climate.

   Here and there, democracy fared well. Not, however, in
South Africa, where the government of Prime Minister John
Vorster cracked down harder than ever upon a restless but
dispirited black majority and banned or arrested many of the
country's leading voices of dissent. But in Spain, after four
decades of repressive dictatorship, more than 20 million voters
turned out peacefully to accomplish what Spanish newspapers
called "a triumph of moderation." Parties of both the far left
and far right were rejected in favor of a middle-of-the-road
government headed by Premier Adolofo Suarez Gonzalez and
dominated by his Democratic Center Union. Voters in India swept
Prime Minister Indira Gandhi out of office after 18 months of
her emergency rule. The new Prime Minister, Morarji Desai,
launched civil and criminal investigations into the discredited
Gandhi government, but by year's end had still not focused his
attention upon India's real problems of overpopulation, economic
inflation, unemployment and growing labor troubles.

   Radical terrorism remained an affliction of the Western
democracies, but one battle was won in that war. West German
Chancellor Helmut Schmidt bravely outplayed the Palestinian
terrorists who skyjacked a Lufthansa airliner in October, saving
the lives of 86 with a commando attack at Mogadishu, Somalia.
Soon afterward, however, the body of Industrialist Hanns-Martin
Schleyer, who had been kidnapped by Baader-Meinhof gangsters six
weeks earlier, was found in the trunk of an abandoned car in
France.

   Yet it was the Middle East that gripped the world's
attention for much of the year. And it was Anwar Sadat who
caught the world's imagination by his diplomatic coup de
theatre. In retrospect, there should not have been too much
surprise that it was Sadat, of all the Middle East's leaders,
who moved in an unexpected way to get peace negotiations
stirring again. Sadat is a far more vigorous and visionary
statesman than has been generally perceived. And he has shown
in the past that he is capable of surprises. In 1971, which he
boldly and perhaps foolishly declared would be a "year of
decision" for the Middle East, he offered to search for a peace
settlement with Israel -- a proposal that the Jerusalem
government of Premier Golda Meir turned aside. The following
year he abruptly evicted Soviet military advisers and experts
from Egypt in a gesture toward the West that Washington failed
to follow up. Then in October 1973 he caught Israel off guard
with his Yom Kippur attack across the Suez. All these events,
like his mission to Jerusalem, appear to have been dictated by
a powerful and almost desperate internal logic.

   Sadat not only wants peace but profoundly needs it. Egypt,
disastrously impoverished and overpopulated, claustrophobically
crowded into the life-sustaining Nile Valley, can no longer
afford to spend 28% of its national budget on military hardware
to aim at Israel. Egypt is also deeply weary of fighting.
In the four bloody wars against Israel (1948, 1956, 1967, 1973),
Egypt, of all the Arab states, has absorbed the heaviest losses.
In '67 Egypt lost 3,000 killed, v. 600 for the Syrians and 696
for the Jordanians. Today the Nile Valley nationalism always
present in the Egyptian character is asserting itself against
the larger, Pan-Arab idea. Over and over Egyptian army officers
repeat: "No more Egyptian blood will be shed for the
Palestinians." That does not mean that Sadat intends to sell out
the Palestinians. But he may be willing to ignore Yasser
Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization if he works out what
he feels is a fair solution to the Palestinian problem, and the
P.L.O. refused to accept it.

   Ironically, Sadat started his peace campaign by going to
war. The road to peace in the autumn of 1973 seemed totally
blocked. Both Arabs and Israelis stared down diplomats as
impassively as gunfighters. The U.S. and the Soviets were
preoccupied with detente. To coax some movement toward peace,
Sadat made one of his swift, dramatic decisions. He chose to
attack Israel. His goal was to score a limited victory along
the Suez Canal. This, he reasoned, would shore up Arab morale,
demonstrate that ultimately no military solution was possible
in the Arab-Israeli struggle, and get the peace process started.
By the end of the 18-day war the Egyptian army had taken a
battering from the Israelis, whose forces west of the Suez were
within 45 miles of Cairo, and allied Syrian forces to the north
had been utterly routed. But in the first week of fighting,
Israeli forces had been caught by surprise and staggered; Sadat
felt he had made his point.

   He followed with a series of quick, pacific gestures. He
accepted a cease-fire with Israel and asked for a Geneva
conference. Less than three weeks after ordering his armor into
the Suez Canal area, he called in a building contractor, his
friend Osman Ahmed Osman. Sadat's instructions: prepare a plan
for reconstructing the war-ruined cities along the Suez Canal.
Sadat told Osman: "I want to rebuild those towns right within
range of Israeli guns. I want to show the Israelis that I don't
intend to make war against them again."

   Sadat in those days was optimistic, and thought that peace
could come quickly with the backing of the U.S. When Henry
Kissinger began his shuttle diplomacy to negotiate a Sinai
disengagement, Sadat wrapped him in the full Arab embrace and
called him "my dear friend Henry." But the momentum died. A
Geneva conference was delayed. The Syrians postponed a
disengagement on the Golan Heights for months while they
quibbled over details. Then U.S. policy became paralyzed by
Watergate and the collapse of Richard Nixon's authority. When
Gerald Ford became President, Sadat tried again for a peace
agreement. But a poisonous war atmosphere started spreading once
more. Sadat next risked what he called a "diplomatic pre-emptive
strike" by announcing unilaterally that he was reopening the
Suez Canal, which had been closed since the 1967 war. That same
week he met with Ford in Salzburg; in September 1975 came the
second Egyptian-Israeli Interim Agreement, which restored the
western edge of the Sinai, including the Abu Rudeis oilfields,
to Cairo's control.

   For a man seemingly addicted to surprise, Sadat has a
talent for patience. He waited for the 1976 U.S. presidential
election, and then Carter's inauguration. Meanwhile, the savage
Lebanese civil war split the Arab world into quarreling camps
and reduced all peace talk once more to diplomatic abstraction.

   Sadat said, again and again, "In the game of Middle Eastern
peace, the U.S. holds 99% of the cards." He switched from the
old Arab policy of trying to force the U.S. to abandon Israel
in favor of the Arabs. He knew that only as a friend of Israel
could the U.S. influence it. "You have a special relationship
with Israel," he told a group of American businessmen on a TIME-
sponsored tour of the Middle East, "and I want you to keep that
relationship." While Sadat encouraged American leaders to
believe that a Middle East peace was in their interest, he also
forged a tight alliance with Saudi Arabia -- not only his
bankroller but also a vital source of U.S. energy supplies.

   Sadat began 1977 at his lowest political ebb since taking
office seven years earlier. In mid-January, Cairo and Alexandria
erupted in the worst rioting since the days of King Farouk --
protests against Sadat's increased food prices and his
government's general failure to raise living standards or
improve the country's tumbledown public services. In the end,
80 Egyptians were killed and nearly 1,000 arrested. Sadat had
to cancel his price increases and call out the army to restore
order. Although Saudi Arabia, other Arab oil states, and the
U.S. put together a $5.4 billion emergency-aid package, the
riots made it clearer than ever that Egypt needed to turn its
priorities from war machinery to economic development.

   For Sadat it was a difficult time. He began to woo Jimmy
Carter, and heard heartening words in return. Carter referred
to the need for a "Palestinian homeland," the first time an
American President had used that meaning-laden code phrase.
Carter mentioned Israeli withdrawal from all occupied
territories -- except for minor frontier changes -- and went
even further than current Arab demands in proposing compensation
for Palestine Arab refugees.

   The Arabs drew some encouragement when then Israeli Premier
Yitzhak Rabin had a chilly meeting with Carter, another sign
that the U.S. no longer was giving blank-check backing to
Israel. Sadat became even more optimistic when he traveled to
Washington in early April. A vital part of the Egyptian's
strategy had been to establish personal contact with Carter. As
Arabist William Polk puts it, "Sadat is a great actor. He loves
and warms to an audience."

   The surprise election of Menachem Begin in May brought down
a cloud of pessimism again, but Sadat insisted: "It does not
matter who governs Israel. There are no doves in Israel, only
hawks." Sadat was more troubled for the moment by Russia. He
detected a Soviet hand in the Cairo riots and feared that
Moscow was out to overthrow moderate Arab regimes, including
his own. It bothered him particularly that the Russians were
installing sophisticated electronic surveillance devices at
Libyan airfields. Sadat dispatched Foreign Minister Ismail
Fahmy to Moscow to ask the Soviets to desist. When they did not,
Sadat made one of his trip-hammer decisions: he sent the
Egyptian air force to pulverize the bases. An Egyptian official
admits: "We broke the rule: we attacked a brother Arab country."
But Sadat felt he could not worry about all his borders
simultaneously. He removed the threat from Libya.

   As Sadat pushed for a Geneva settlement, U.S. domestic
politics became a powerful factor. In October the U.S. and the
Soviet Union issued a joint declaration on Middle Eastern peace,
restating the basic points of Security Council Resolution 242
(which clearly implies that Israel has the right to exist in
peace and security after withdrawing from occupied Arab
territories). But the declaration went further than 242 in
mentioning "the legitimate rights" of the Palestinians, a code
phrase roughly equivalent to calling for a Palestinian entity
of some kind. That declaration brought a furious reaction from
some American Jewish organizations and other pro-Israeli groups.
In a bitter bargaining session with Israel's Moshe Dayan, Carter
backed down and announced that the U.S.-Soviet agreement would
not be the basis of a Geneva conference. After this display of
power by the pro-Israeli organizations within the U.S., Sadat
began to rethink his strategy of looking for a settlement
strictly through U.S. channels.

   Israel had built up an arsenal of sophisticated arms,
including nuclear weapons, that beggared the Arab military
potential. General Mohamed Abdel Ghany Gamassy, Egypt's Minister
of War and overall commander of the armed forces, told Sadat
that if war broke out, his army would be devastated. Because of
Sadat's frosty relations with Moscow, there was no longer a
Soviet supply link; Egyptian forces had slipped badly in
relation to the Israelis since the strike across the Suez in
1973. Now Cairo began to hear rumors that Menachem Begin was
ready to use his hardware for a pre-emptive "war of
annihilation" against Arab armies if the U.S began putting too
much pressure on Israel. Sadat's "American connection" carried
with it an ominous danger.

   In late October Gamassy and his commanders urged Sadat to
push hard for a peace settlement; the military, which is the
anchor of Sadat's domestic support, pledged to back any move
he cared to make. But if Carter's hand was indeed stayed by the
U.S. pro-Israeli lobby, there seemed no obvious leverage with
which to seek Israeli concessions. To the chagrin of Washington
and the outrage of most Arabs, Begin's government had encouraged
new settlements in the occupied territories. All told, there are
now 51 Jewish settlements on the West Bank, 19 in the Sinai, and
26 on the Golan Heights. The U.S. maneuvered for a Geneva peace
conference, but the process degenerated into procedural
nitpicking, much of it on the key issue of who would represent
the Palestinians. Sadat believed that if everyone continued
quibbling over what he called "a word here, a comma there," he
would not get to Geneva for months; peace might be delayed for
years. High-level diplomats think Sadat also had another fear:
at Geneva, his moderate position might be outvoted by the
Russians, who hate him, and by hard-lining Syrians and
Palestinians.

   And so the Egyptian was led to his historic leap of
imagination. It represented such a total change in Arab behavior
that at first no one believed that Sadat meant what he said. In
a speech on Nov. 9 to the Egyptian parliament, Sadat declared:
"There is no time to lose. I am ready to go to the ends of the
earth if that will save one of my soldiers, one of my officers,
from being scratched. I am ready to go to their house, to the
Knesset, to discuss peace with the Israeli leaders."

   Almost everyone assumed that the statement was only a
rhetorical flourish. Despite numerous secret contacts over the
years, it had been uniform Arab policy not to deal publicly with
Israeli leaders. During the time of the British mandate in
Palestine, Arab leaders would never sit at the negotiating table
with their Zionist counterparts. After the creation of Israel
in 1948, the boycott was even more through. At the Arab-Israeli
Lausanne conference of 1949, the two sides stayed in separate
hotels, never saw one another, and communicated only through
couriers. When Lebanon's Charles Malik was president of the U.N.
General Assembly, he once strayed into the Israeli pavilion at
an international fair and drank a champagne toast. He was
photographed in the act and was savagely attacked throughout
the Arab world.

   Early this year Sadat himself vowed: "As long as there is
an Israeli soldier on my land, I am not ready to contact anyone
in Israel at all." Thus his announcement caught even his wife
Jihan by surprise. In fact, Sadat had secretly been mulling over
the idea for some months. On Nov. 14 Sadat told CBS-TV's Walter
Cronkite that he was ready to go to Jerusalem if asked. Menachem
Begin responded with Israel's formal invitation. One of the
diplomatic sensations of the century was accomplished.

   Sadat, of course, had every reason to take pride in his
initiative. Yet even though he had at least temporarily eclipsed
Washington as the indispensable peacemaker in the Middle East,
his breakthrough would not have been possible without the
efforts by the U.S. to coax the region toward stability. Under
Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, Henry Kissinger embarked upon
the shuttle diplomacy that helped restore U.S. credibility in
the Arab world, which had increasingly been heeding the Soviet
call. And credit also belonged to Jimmy Carter. His activities
and statements on the Middle East at times seemed erratic, but
they stirred diplomatic movement in a useful way and led Sadat
to know that the U.S., too, had a leader willing to consider
new approaches. Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, another new
figure in the equation, served as a stabilizing influence by
impressing both Arabs and Israelis as an honest broker.

   Sadat's gamble raises big new questions for the Middle
East. The central issue no longer concerns the possibility of
peace. The questions now are: What kind of peace? And at what
cost to whom? Arab unity has been shattered. Despite the
ferocious anti-Sadat rhetoric of the rejectionists, it is they
who are isolated, not Egypt, so long as moderate Arabs back the
quest for peace. For the moment, the influence of Yasser Arafat
and his Palestine Liberation Organization is on the wane. In
trying to cope with the conflicting demands of his constituency,
Arafat declined to seize the moment, refused to join in the
peace process. Jimmy Carter all but read the P.L.O. out of a
settlement when he denounced it as "completely negative." In
desperation, moderate Palestinians may eventually be willing to
go along with any Sadat-Begin arrangement for the West Bank and
Gaza. If that happens, radicals would desert Arafat and coalesce
around the irreconcilable George Habash and his Popular Front
for the Liberation of Palestine.

   Could Sadat and Begin conclude a separate peace, one that
ignored all the other problems of the area? Almost everyone
involved denies that such an arrangement is possible or
desireable. Nonetheless, a "comprehensive" settlement for the
Middle East could be preceded by a modified separate agreement
involving Egypt and Israel. National Security Advisor Zbigniew
Brzezinski offers this analysis: "A separate Egyptian-Israeli
deal is not likely to endure. Nor is it acceptable to Sadat. But
if there is a movement of the moderate Palestinians, the
Jordanians and the Saudis, then we have the makings of real,
real progress." Brzezinski proposes a theory of "concentric
circles" for negotiations. The first circle, now in process,
involves talks between the Israelis and Egyptians, with the U.S.
hovering close by. The second circle of activity would include
the moderate Arabs. The third circle, encompassing the Soviets
and Syrians, would be the last.

   As he flew to Ismailia on Christmas Day, Begin was
fortified by the Israeli Cabinet's unanimous approval of his
peace plans. In his briefcase would be the proposals that Begin
had discussed with Jimmy Carter, which presumably had been
refined. Carter had argued that Israel move farther toward
compromise, especially on the difficult question of the West
Bank. Many Israelis fear that self-rule for the West Bank, as
proposed by Begin, would eventually lead to the establishment
of a Palestinian state. Most Israelis regard that prospect as
totally unacceptable. Eventual independence for the West Bank,
perhaps in federation with Jordan, is exactly what Sadat wants.
At the very least, he believes a Palestinian entity should
receive such "symbols of sovereignty" as a flag and the right
to issue its own passports.

   The Begin-Sadat meeting was preceded by other high-level
contacts last week, notably the two days of talks in Egypt
between Israel's Defense Minister Ezer Weizman and Egypt's
General Gamassy. The two generals concentrated on the future of
the Sinai, discussing further Israeli withdrawals and the
widening of the demilitarized zones. Those negotiations
represented "a concrete hypotheses" of Christmas Day agenda.

   Barring an unexpected disaster, the Begin-Sadat talks at
Christmas could produce an umbrella declaration of principles
and perhaps a token arrangement of mutual good will. After that,
the Cairo conference talks could very well be raised to the
Foreign Minister level for purposes of negotiating a detailed
settlement. Sadat has told TIME of his willingness to make his
arrangements with Begin, and then inform the other Arab states
that he has negotiated a framework in which they too can
negotiate. In effect, Sadat is thinking of a separate peace with
sequels -- leaving the other Arabs to work on their own special
accommodations. To avoid appearing to have made a separate deal
at the expense of his Arab colleagues, Sadat could refuse to
sign a formal peace treaty but instead initial a memorandum of
understanding that would call for major withdrawals by Israel
from the occupied territories. This would not only keep the
peace momentum going, it might also tempt Jordan, and perhaps
eventually Syria, to talk separately with Israel.

   Saudi Arabia, with its oil wealth and its links to both
moderates and rejectionists, remains crucial to any permanent
peace in the Middle East. Although the Saudis have been
extremely cautious since the beginning of Sadat's initiative,
it seems most unlikely that they would stand in the way of a
settlement. They have not only invested heavily in Egypt's
future, they have a political and economic investment in Middle
East stability. The Saudis could play a key role in reconciling
the Syrians to the Egyptian design for peace. The Syrian economy
is in grave difficulty, with inflation running at 25%. If the
Saudis were to offer major financial backing in return for a
Syrian-Egyptian reconciliation, President Hafez Assad might have
to assent, no matter how much he dislikes the idea of being
forced to negotiate with Israel. But Assad's position is a
delicate one. He belongs to a minority Muslim sect (the
Alawites), and his seven-year-old regime is the longest-lasting
since Syria gained independence in 1946. If he were to accept
a Sadat-dictated peace approach, he could face serious internal
efforts to overthrow him.

   If, with Saudi acquiescence, the Egyptians conclude an
arrangement with the Israelis, and the Syrians, Jordanians and
moderate Palestinians fall into line, and almost complete Middle
East peace would be in sight. That prospect opens wider
horizons, ones already being discussed. In Cairo, Egyptians were
speculating in hushed tones last week about an eventual
unofficial alliance of Egypt, Israel and Iran that would link
three countries with complementary economic assets: manpower,
Western technology and oil wealth. For the first time, Egypt
would have non-Arab allies in the region. The political basis
for such a partnership would be common opposition to extension
of Soviet or leftist power in the Middle East -- a reflection
of Sadat's growing conviction that the real danger to him is
represented by the Soviet Union, not Israel.

   Before Sadat flew to Israel, the Middle East appeared to
be on another of its terrible swings toward war, another violent
spasm in the tragic politics of the region. But by one act, the
Egyptian President has broken through the seemingly predestined
cycle of hatred and killing. Not since the founding of Israel
in 1948 has the will for peace in the Middle East been stronger.
If his specific initiative proves unfruitful, there remains a
danger that both sides might once again gear up for war. And yet
it seems unlikely that the past's bitter patterns of stagnation
and violence could return. The very memory of Anwar Sadat at Ben
Gurion Airport, at Al Aqsa mosque, at the Knesset, will serve
as an enduring reminder that a better way for the Middle East
is possible.