The World Since 1945 by P. M. H. Bell & Mark Gilbert

Author:P. M. H. Bell & Mark Gilbert
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury

The Egypt–Israel peace treaty, 1979

In the October War of 1973, Egypt, Syria, Jordan and Iraq all took part in the fighting and coordinated their plans successfully at the start of the conflict. The oil-producing countries, which were mostly conservative monarchies, rallied to the support of the front-line states, which were mostly left-wing and modernizers. From the Maghreb, far distant from the fighting zone, Morocco sent troops and Algeria joined in the oil embargo. The war had also restored Arab military pride, after the disasters of earlier conflicts against Israel. This time the Arab armies, and especially the Egyptians, had fought on level terms. Sadat was now in a position to negotiate with Israel from a position of at least some strength; which had been his principal aim in going to war in the first place. The Israelis, on the other hand, were badly shaken. The immense self-confidence which had led them to reject any compromise after the Six-Day War had been dented, and they became more willing to negotiate with their enemies. How negotiations could begin, and whether they could succeed, remained to be seen.

When Sadat first planned the October War, he recognized that the superpowers would have to be drawn in to achieve successful negotiations. Yet involvement of the superpowers proved a slow and difficult business.

The October War brought about a significant shift in Soviet policy. The limits of their influence on the Arab countries had been exposed, and détente had been destabilized. Moscow now began to press for a Middle East settlement, on conditions satisfactory to itself. Moscow’s position was that an agreement should be reached with full Soviet involvement (not just that of the United States), and that it should be a comprehensive settlement that included the Palestinians. This was an important development. In 1973 the Soviets had begun to refer to Palestinian ‘national rights’, and in September 1974, Nikolai Podgorny (the president of the Soviet Union) publicly advocated the creation of a Palestinian state. The Soviet government gave permission for a PLO office to be set up in Moscow in 1974. By 1977 the Soviet Union had articulated a four-point plan for a Middle East settlement: Soviet–American cooperation in negotiations; Israeli withdrawal from all territories conquered in 1967 and afterwards; the recognition of the independence, integrity and security of all states in the region, including Israel; and the acceptance of the Palestinian right to an independent state on the West Bank. The United States, on the other hand, regarded a Middle East settlement as its own affair. Henry Kissinger, secretary of state in the administration of President Gerald Ford, conducted a lengthy period of ‘shuttle diplomacy’ with Israel and Egypt between 1975 and 1976 to the exclusion of the Soviet Union. Kissinger’s memoirs contain some interesting reflections about what the fundamental problems of the Arab–Israeli relationship were. On the one hand, the Israelis ‘endowed the peace process with a nearly metaphysical significance’ and demanded that any peace treaty should ‘deliver relations with its neighbors as close as those between, say, Belgium and the Netherlands’.

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