Sadat's Strategy

Submitted by Prof. Paul Eidelberg (Israel), Nov 21, 2006 at 20:05

Three days before Anwar Sadat's historic visit to Jerusalem on November 19, 1977, the present writer warned Prime Minister Menachem Begin's adviser on Arab Affairs that Israel was inviting the fox into the chicken coup.

The next day, in the state dinner held in Sadat's honor (after his speech in the Knesset), the Egyptian president—an admitted admirer of Hitler—wore a tie bearing a pattern of inverted swastikas!

In my book Sadat's Strategy (December 1978, Hebrew; May 1979, English) there is significant evidence (as I personally warned Mr. Begin the day before he went to the September 1978 Camp David Summit) that Sadat was pursuing a phased strategy aimed at Israel's destruction—the strategy adopted by PLO chief Yasser Arafat and now being further implemented by his comrade in terrorism, Mahmoud Abbas.

Sadat hinted at this strategy in an interview with al-Anwar on June 22, 1975: "The effort of our generation is to return to the 1967 borders. Afterward the next generation will carry the responsibility."

Before the signing of the Israel-Egyptian peace treaty of March 26, 1979, Israel's great novelist, the late Moshe Shamir, read passages of Sadat's Strategy to the Knesset, of which he was a member. To no avail.

The year after signing that treaty with Israel, Sadat ominously declared: "Despite the present differences with the Arab 'rejectionist' rulers over the Egyptian peace initiative, the fact remains that these differences are only tactical not strategic, temporary not permanent" (The Egyptian Gazette, April 16, 1980).

In a New York Times interview dated October 19, 1980, Sadat boasted: "Poor Menachem, he has his problems ... After all, I got back ... the Sinai and the Alma oil fields, and what has Menachem got? A piece of paper."

Sadat contained, in addition to the Alma oil fields, a $1.5 billion Israeli developed infrastructure including highly sophisticated Israeli airbases plus the Jewish settlement of Yamit (whose abandonment set the precedent for Israel's abandonment, in 2005, of 25 Jewish communities in Gaza and northern Samaria).

All this for a "piece of paper"? Perhaps I should therefore mention the following: At a 1979 press conference in Jerusalem, Dr. Joseph Churba, a former U.S. Air Force top intelligence analyst for the Middle East, said that during the three months before the Camp David Summit, Israel did not receive a single nut or a bolt in the U.S. military supply line.

By the way, Churba's remarks were not reported by the media.

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