Lynn Walsh: Can Sadat Bring Peace?

[Militant No. 383, 25^th November 1977 p. 12

Sadat’s dramatic visit to Israel has split the Arab states and provoked world-wide protests by the Palestinians. The Egyptian president must now be high up on the Palestinians’ hit list.

Is it surprising that the Palestinians are incensed? Dispossessed by Israel, harassed in Jordan, and recently, betrayed by Syria in Lebanon, they have now been openly stabbed in the back by the regime in Egypt, which under Nasser once shouted loudest for their cause.

For decades Arab leaders, including Nasser and then Sadat, have imbued the Arab masses with militant nationalism and the hatred of Israel, often hatred of the Jews. After this, the visit appears as an indecent gesture.

Not New

Why the sharp change? In Jerusalem, Sadat said nothing new. He repeated the basic demands of the Arab states. Did he believe that, having rejected them for a decade in spite of the constant threat of war, Israel, led by the right wing Zionist Begin, would accept them because he has stepped on to Israeli soil?

What the other Arab states, and especially the Palestinians, fear is that behind Sadat’s formal reiteration of the old demands was a tacit willingness to buy “peace at any price” – including the sacrifice of a Palestinian homeland. Apart from his speech in the Knesset, Sadat made no mention of the Palestinians. Begin, for his part, promised no concessions at all.

The Arab states’ leaders, apart from Hussein of Jordan, have unanimously condemned Sadat’s initiative, even Saudi Arabia the most reactionary and pro-American, and the present paymaster of Egypt’s army.

Greeted by the world capitalist press as a heroic step towards peace, Sadat’s visit is really a desperate gamble. The need to deflect attention from the crisis at home certainly weighed heavily in his calculations. In Egypt there is undoubtedly a desperate desire for an assured peace settlement. But will the benefits of peace be shared equally?

Sadat’s policy reflects above all the interests of the new breed of capitalist and state bureaucrat which has emerged since Sadat completed the reversal of Nasser’s policies, broke with the Soviet Union, compromised with the big landowners and capitalists, opened the country to foreign capital, and cemented closer relations with US imperialism. For them peace means power, profits and privilege.

But it is Egypt’s workers and peasants who carried the burden of the conflict with Israel. The strike wave that erupted earlier this year revealed a desperate economic situation and posed a serious threat to the regime.

Palestinians

At the moment, Sadat holds out an almost irresistible promise of peace. But when the peace, if it comes, bears no fruit, the anger of the disappointed masses will spell the end of Sadat.

Can there be such a thing as a “permanent peace” in the Middle East? Even the United States which now treats Egypt as a client state almost on a par with Israel, has sounded a note of caution because nothing has been offered to the Palestinians.

Sadat hopes to buy, with US help (and Jordanian collusion) a unilateral peace with Israel. But the roots of the conflict will remain. Even while Sadat was in Jerusalem, Israeli jets were rocketing Arab villages in Lebanon. Sadat may buy time, but he cannot buy peace. What he is forced to trade in the process, moreover, may well prove as fatal to him as war itself.

Fear

There can be no lasting peace within the existing framework of class interests and national conflicts. Sadat, Begin, and all the other leaders are enmeshed in a web spun over more than a century by colonial powers and the regimes that they have propped up, manipulated and, more recently, clashed with.

While landlordism and capitalism remain there is no way the aspirations of the Arab and Israeli masses can be reconciled or satisfied.

A solution awaits the initiative of the workers and peasants themselves. It is fear of their movement, in conjunction with the workers in the West, which lies behind the desperate manoeuvres of the diplomats to stave off war and crisis.

Lynn Walsh