World Continued from page 1 eee hen pressed by ' reporters to be specific about Israeli withdraw- al, a US. offi- cial said that the Israelis intend- ed to leave about 6,000 troops in the West Bank and Gaza. “But,” exclaimed a reporters, “that’s what the Israelis have ' now.” Former U.S. president Jimmy Carter claimed in his book “The Blood of Abra-. ham” that he and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat were convinced that the Camp David accords had protected the Palestinians’ right to self-determination. But the accords did not mention self- determination. They simply referred to the Palestinians’ “legitimate rights.” And Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin left no doubt about his belief that these legitimate rights did not include self-determination. The Camp David accords were in fact based on Begin’s plan of self-rule for the Palestinians about which the New York Times wrote: “It does not take an Arab eye to read into it much ‘rule’ but little ‘self’.” Sull, Carter bitterly complained later than Begin “proved unwilling to carry out the more difficult commitments” of Camp David. The Israeli government viewed the agreement as giving it licence to consolidate its occupation. More settlements were built in the occupied territories and the Israeli government adopted the position that it intended to raise its claim to sovereignty over the West Bank and Gaza. “It is clear,” commented Abba Eban, “that the Israeli government policy is so distant from Camp David that when Likud spokesmen invoke the agreement, they are rather like Casan- ova invoking the Seventh Commandment.” The second part of the Camp David accords led to the signing of the peace treaty between Egypt and Israel in March, 1979. Arab reactions to the treaty were swift. Arab economic aid to Egypt was discon- tinued, diplomatic relations were severed, and Egypt, the leader of the Arab world, was expelled from the Arab League. Isolated, President Sadat asked for more American economic and military aid, and invited the U.S. to use Egyptian military facilities “to project more military power in the Middle East.” But the American-Egyptian relation and increased American aid were, to a large extent, determined by how Egypt accepted Israeli actions. Egypt was, observed Her- man Eilts, former U.S.. ambassador to Egypt, “judged by Washington on how it conducted itself toward Israel.” At the same time, Washington was unable to restrain Israeli behavior in the region and spare Egypt humiliation in the Arab world. For instance, shortly after Egypt signed a protocol for cultural co-operation with Israel making it a criminal offence in Egypt to oppose Camp David, Israel annexed Arab Jerusalem, strengthening opposition in Egypt to Camp David. In February, 1981, the Socialist Labour Party, then the major opposition party in Egypt, withdrew its support of Camp David and raised the Palestinian flag on its headquarters. On June 7, 1981, only two days after his meeting with President Sadat, Israeli Prime Minister Begin sent his planes to bombard the Iraqi nuclear reactor. In July, Israel launched a massive air raid against residen- tial West Beirut in which 300 civilians were killed. The Camp David constituency in Egypt was rapidly disappearing. Many Egyptians, observed an Egyptian intellec- tual, “perceived their president either as a fool, or as a traitor.” Sadat had hoped that his peace initia- tives, and political and military co- operation with the United States would help ~ him achieve two major goals: to bring to Egypt, in his words, “prosperity that defies the imagination,” and to bring American pressure to bear on Israel to withdraw from 8 e Pacific Tribune, April 10, 1989 Ten years later, events pass judgment on Camp David accord Egyptian president Anwar Sadat (I), U.S. president Jimmy Carter and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin at Camp David signing; at right Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak. the occupied Arab territories. By 1981, four years after his historic visit to Israel, he had accomplished neither. nable to influence his new friends, and abandoned by his former allies, Sadat faced increased oppo- sition at home. He responded with what he called a “purge.” In September, 1981, he arrested and threw in jail 1,500 opposi- tion leaders, intellectuals, writers and reli- gious leaders. Nawal el-Sadawi, a leading Egyptian feminist, was among them. She wrote from her prison: “TI had been looking for a satis- factory reason for my arrest and the arrest of this enormous number of people of such different persuasions, tendencies and ideas. Those people whom Sadat arrested had nothing in common except their opposition to the peace with Israel.” On Oct. 6, 1981, Sadat was assassinated : by officers belonging to a militant Islamic group. When Israel invaded Lebanon in June 1982, the new Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak faced growing popular opposi- tion to the treaty with Israel. But he resisted calls for repudiation of Camp David and allowed the flow of Egyptian oil to Israel to continue uninterrupted. Still, the Israeli siege of Beirut and the daily images of indis- criminate Israeli bombardments of an Arab capital practically killed the Camp David constituency in Egypt. Egyptian intellectuals who had champi- oned:Camp David admitted that they had been mistaken. Tawfiq al-Hakim, Egypt’s “dean of letters,” concluded that he “had been deceived in his search for peace with Israel.” Anis Mansour, one of the most prominent Egyptian writers who had | defended Camp David, wrote: “There is not a single voice in Egypt that has not dis- avowed its previous faith in the possibility of total peace with Israel.” It was a favourable climate for a humbled Egypt to seek a return to the Arab fold. In December 1983, President Mubarak received Palestine Liberation Organization chair- man Yasser Arafat and emphasized Egypt’s support for the Palestinians’ right to self- determination. But Cairo’s rapprochement with the Palestinians led to conflict with Washing- ton. When Egypt refused to extradite four Palestinian hijackers in October, 1985, the U.S. Navy F-14 fighters intercepted the Egyptian plane carrying them to Tunis, and forced it to land in Sicily, where the Palesti- nians Were abducted. The CIA had intercepted Mubarak’s phone conversations with his foreign minis- ter and learned about the details of the flight. Egypt’s public humiliation was com- pounded by the embarrassing revelation of the extent of American spying in Egypt. The CIA, according to Bob Woodward of the Washington Post, “had the Egyptian government wired electronically and had agents from top to bottom.” Embarrassed by Israel, humiliated by the U.S., the Egyptian government was hard pressed to defend Camp David in the face of renewed denunciations when Israel bombed the PLO headquarters in Tunis in October 1985. But the Mubarak government responded with restraint. In fact, it emphas- ized its commitment to the treaty with Israel by returning the Egyptian ambassador to Tel-Aviv after Israel withdrew from most of Lebanon, and agreed to arbitration over the Taba dispute — recently settled in favour of Egypt. Still, the peace between the two countries remained, as one Egyptian official put it to me, “a cold peace.” Indeed, attempts at normalization of relations have been opposed by student, labour and profes- sional organizations which denounced Israeli actions in the region. Outside Egyptian oil sales, trade between Egypt and Israel has often been conducted through third parties. Tourism has flour- ished, but only in one direction: from Israel to Egypt. In October, 1987 — before the Palestinian uprising erupted — close to 17,000 Israelis visited Egypt, compared to 700 Egyptians, mostly of Palestinian origin, who went to Israel. Camp David and the American connec- tion are also blamed by some in the Egyp- tian army for the growing military gap between Egypt and Israel. Two recent events dramatized Israel’s overwhelming superiority: the Vanunu revelations about Israel’s nuclear weapons, and the recent launch of Israel’s first satellite Ofiq I. “This means,” observed Egypt’s former defence minister Lt-Gen. Mohammed Fawzi, “that Israel can hit any target in the Arab world” using a chemical, nuclear, or conventional bomb. Perhaps the most fundamental difference between Egypt and Israel remains their respective views of Camp David. Ezer Weizman, Israel’s defence minister at the time, summarized it correctly: “Where the Egyptians saw the Sinai agreement as a model for similar understandings with Jor- dan and Syria over the West Bank and the Golan Heights, Begin saw it as the precise opposite. As far as he was concerned, the withdrawal from the Sinai would be the end of the story.” Ten years after Camp David, the Israeli government has not modified its views. But Egypt has re-examined its previous faith in Camp David and returned to the Arab fold. The extent of popular dissatisfaction in Egypt is such that today all legalized oppo- sition parties in Egypt are against Camp David. In recognizing the recently proclaimed Palestinian state, Egypt has established the political link, which Camp David failed to make, between its peace with Israel and withdrawal from the occupied Arab territo- ries. This suggests that the treaty between _Egypt and Israel will now become more vulnerable to continued occupation and denial of Palestinian national rights. Professor Safty teaches Social Sciences and Language Education at the University of British Columbia. The author of many arti- cles on the Middle East, he is currently work- ing ona book on the Palestinian question and the United States.