351. Camp David: The Day Israel & Egypt Made Peace (Part 6)

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0:30Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnand. And me, William Durempel. Last time, we discussed the Yom Kippur War, 1973, the secret warning from King Hussein that was dismissed, the audacity of Sadat's deception operation, the Egyptian water cannons blasting through the Barlev Line, and Sharon's counterattack across the Suez Canal. Today, we're in the aftermath, the world that 1973 made. And Eugene Rogan, our wonderful friend of the show, our most favorite guest, we're not allowed to say that, but it's true, professor of modern Middle Eastern history at Sadat Can I just say, other favourite guests are also available.

1:08And Eugene, for those who have not come across me before, is the Professor of Modern Middle Eastern History at St. Anthony's College, Oxford, and the author of The Arabs, which have been my companion for the last two, three weeks. This extraordinary book taking us from the Mamluk period, but then diving deep into all this extraordinary modern history. And Eugene is back for his fifth episode in this series to guide us through one of the most dramatic episodes in modern history. Because, you know, if 1973 can be regarded as the earthquake, today's episode is all about the tectonic shifts that any earthquake produces, but the geopolitical shifts that we're still living through today.

1:50Eugene, a very warm welcome to you. Thank you, Anita. Good to be back. Can we start with talking about one of the main characters in this episode, and that is Menachem Begin? Because if you look at Begin, his biography is like a 20th century summary in one man, because he's born in Brest-Litovsk in 1913. It's part of the Russian Empire then, now it's Belarus. And he is part of a family of deeply observant Zionist Jews. The Nazi invasion destroys almost every single person that he loves. Both his parents are murdered. His brother is killed. Begin flees to the Soviet Union. He's then arrested by the NKVD.

2:29He spends time in a Siberian labor camp. He reaches Palestine in 1942 as part of the Polish army. And by 1943, just a very short space of time, he's the commander of the Irgun Zwei Lumi, the Jewish underground organization that the British themselves classified as a terrorist group and that most of the Zionist mainstream regarded as dangerously extreme. First of all, tell us why did they have that attitude to Irgun? And then just tell us a little more about how quickly Begin rose through the ranks. Well, there were two dissident groups that break away from the Haganah, dissatisfied by changes in British policy that were going to restrict Jewish immigration and would deny the Yishuv, the Jewish community of Palestine, their ultimate goal of statehood.

3:13And these two groups decide that you have to take a much harder line, even at the height of the Second World War, and begin to push back against the restrictions imposed by the British colonial authorities in the mandate. And they believe that the only things that the British would understand would be violence. So they bring violence to it. I remember in writing the Arabs setting off a bit of a frisson by describing Menachem Begin as a terrorist. But he would have adopted the title himself, and it was certainly what he was accused of by the British. They were, in a sense, the people without a major state army behind them.

3:45They used the weapons of the weak, which is to say terrorism, to try and achieve their political aims and literally drive Britain, which since 1939 was no longer seen as the handmaiden to the birth of an Israeli state or a Jewish state, to what they now termed as an illegitimate colonial occupier in Eretz Israel. And they declare war against this British mandate in 1944. And they, I mean, the British even put a price on Begin's head. I mean, that's how seriously they take the threat from him. Begin was, in every sense of the word, a fanatic. But I think you've explained why, Anita. Having seen his world of Poland destroyed by the murderous anti-Semitism, the genocidal anti-Semitism of Nazi Germany, he was only too aware of what was being done in Europe to Jews.

4:33And there is going to be a side to these new Zionists coming in the context of the Second World War, which is an absolute desperation, a will to statehood, because they believe that without that, there will be no safety for Jews in the world. It could happen again. And so, Begin is willing to use all methods at his disposal to get the desired goal of a safe haven for Jews in a very dangerous world. And Eugene, tell us about the two main atrocities which are put at his door, the blowing up of the King David Hotel and then Deir Yassin. So the King David Hotel is the headquarters of the British mandate authorities during the immediate aftermath of the Second World War.

5:17And as such, I had gathered all the papers of all the investigations that the British had been doing against both the Irgun, which Begin headed, and the Stern gang, which was headed by Yitzhak Shamir, a colleague of Begin's who would later rise to become prime minister as well. And the papers gathered in these investigations revealed that there was a period of collaboration between all three Jewish armed forces, the Haganah, the legitimate army of the Yishuv, and these two splinter groups, terrorist groups, the Stern Gang and the Etzel or the Irgun. And their fear was if that connection was established by the British going through the papers they had seized, this could lead to a clampdown on the armed forces of the Yishuv.

5:57And so Begin takes matters in hand and determines that the only way to ensure that the compromising material that the British Secretariat holds is never used against the Yeshuv, they had to blow up the building that contained it. They arranged a team carrying milk tins to go into the basement of the building. And they claimed that they gave due warning. The British maintained there was no warning, but the explosion was an earthquake. And it literally sheared a wing off the hotel. It killed scores of people, wounded many, many more, and of course, scattered to the winds all of the papers. And what's the first sort of such hotel bombing?

6:34I mean, since then, we've seen many other hotels in the Middle East blown up, including most recently in Taba by al-Qaeda. But this was the first hotel bombing in the Middle East. Yeah. And I think, Will, it was a shock for the British authorities to have an act of such violence. And it was so clearly a terrorist act targeting a civilian site like a hotel. And it was, in that sense, unprecedented. So yeah, you're right. I think modern viewers might be a little bit inured to this kind of violence by the regular spectacle we've seen of buildings collapsing. But for 1946, unprecedented. And tell us about Der Yassin as well, because we covered it a little bit in our Gaza series, but it'd be worth reminding people again what that was.

7:19Well, Der Yassin is a village near Jerusalem where the villagers in the context of an ongoing civil war between Jewish and Arab forces in Palestine in the aftermath of the UN partition resolution of November 1947, actually concluded a non-aggression pact with the Jewish forces, and basically said they would do no harm to Jewish forces if Jewish forces would do no harm to them. And the Haganah respected that non-aggression pact, but the two breakaway factions, the terrorist organizations of the Jewish armed resistance, the Stern Gang, the Irgun, did not respect this non-aggression pact. And they sought to sow panic that might provoke flight so that Palestinians would flee the areas.

8:08Literally the definition of terrorism, to create terror. It is an act of terror. And so they broke the peace with the village. They came in large numbers of armed men and literally shot their way through the village, driving villagers out and killing those who stayed. The numbers were disputed. We used to talk about numbers around the range of 250. It was actually Palestinian historians who have revised the figure downward to a figure that's more around, I think, around 150. But the fact of the matter was, it was a massive killing of Palestinian civilians designed to provoke panic and flight. And it achieved exactly that goal in that, in the aftermath of Darius Sin, there was a sense among Palestinian civilians that there was no force to protect them against the violence of the Jewish forces.

8:55But at the same time, because it was seen as an atrocity, a war crime, it was an act denounced not just by the British authorities, but I would say by influential Jewish leaders right around the world who did not wish to associate the forces at work in Mandate Palestine trying to fill the potential of statehood that the partition resolution of the UN gave them. They were very concerned that the violence done in Darius C not derail that. So, you'll see many denunciations of the violence that isolated Begin and Shamir for what their militias did. Yeah, but you know, again, it's the timelines for Begin, which are head spinning, because in other series that we've done here on Empire, we see that that transition from being somebody who's involved in terrorism to somebody who is then involved in statesman business, you know, who becomes a politician, it's gradual, it's slow.

9:44But after 1948, Begin quite quickly forms the conservative right-wing party, Herod. First of all, how does that happen? How do people react to that. As you say, you know, there were people in the Haganah who may have sympathized with him and others who didn't, but certainly he was deemed a threat one day and then the other day, okay, a politician. So, Menachem Begin was a different kind of politician than the more liberal labor Zionists who, coming from Germany and Eastern Europe, had really been the leadership of the Jewish community in Palestine or the Yishuv. This is your Jewish executive. And they were led by Ben-Gurion.

10:22They presented a reasonable face of Zionism to the world, and they hoped through persuasion and negotiation to achieve their goals. Begin was an extremist. And as we said before, he knew all too well about the violence that was being done to Jews that we would call the Holocaust after the war, when the true magnitude was known. But he was already aware of that and was absolutely determined to achieve statehood. But once Israel had achieved that statehood at the end of the 1948 war and after the armistice agreements in 1949. He then does transition to engage in the political sphere of the new state of Israel.

10:59And he's there to represent a more right-wing vision than the liberal labor Zionism of Ben-Gurion and Co. He's much more informed by revisionist Zionism associated with the hardline of Zev Jabotinsky, who was going to be very influential, not just through Herut and Likud, but right down through Netanyahu and the current right-wing government that he holds. Well, I mean, we've touched on him in your company before, but just remind everybody who Jabotinsky was. Jabotinsky is the Zionist philosopher of the Iron Wall, which is to say, you don't expect any people to willingly give up their land. You must force them out, and then you must force them to respect your new ownership of their land by mounting such a strong wall that no one will be able to break through it.

11:44And this has been, if you like, the militarist vision of Israel, which has inspired many in the right and extreme right of the Israeli political spectrum. Which we're seeing played out this minute in the West Bank. Yeah, what I wanted to say, though, is we do it injustice to Begin to characterize him just as the extremist. He was actually, he was a very eloquent soapbox politician. My colleague Avi Shlaim writes in his memoir, Three Worlds, about his experiences of moving from Iraq to Israel after 1950. And as a young man, the first person he was attracted to politically was Menachem Begin. Really?

12:26He would go to rallies of Begin's party and was just immediately swept away by the sheer force and charisma of the man's rhetoric. And of course, he was speaking to those who were disenfranchised by the Ashkenazi-dominated liberal labor Zionism. Begin was going to find his footing among the disenfranchised immigrants, particularly Mizrahi Jews coming from the Arab world and were, in a sense, the disadvantaged immigrants in Israel. Those were his people, and he was to prove increasingly successful in displacing Ashkenazi labor Zionism with a more right-wing Zionism we associate with the Likud. Which brings us up now to 1977, which is where, in a sense, we're really sort of kicking off in this episode.

13:11May 1977, Menachem Bergen wins the election, and it's the first time Likud has come to power, and it's an earthquake. It's a revolution. And I think it confronts Israelis with a new reality that it will take them time to adapt to. These realities are that those once marginalized sort of North African or Arab Jews or Iranian Jews have now come to power. And this is a harder line Israel that is less interested in peace than it is in securing the territorial hold over a greater Israel, running from the Jordan River right to the Mediterranean Sea. But with that background and with that message and that kind of charisma, it isn't it surprising that Begin's first term is also the one that, you know, he's the man who's most committed to greater Israel, but he's also the man who signs the first Arab-Israeli peace treaty.

14:11How does that happen? It's a remarkable story, Anita. And I think that it reveals Menahem Begin to have been an unwilling passenger on a bus that sets in motion not in Tel Aviv, but in Cairo. when an Egyptian president that we have previously written off as being rather uncharismatic, whose street cred was enormously elevated by the success of the initial Egyptian war effort in 1973, and who seems to be motivated, first and foremost, by realigning Egypt with the United States to help with its development needs and to secure its position in the Arab world. And his awareness is that the best way to get in closer to the United States would be to address the unresolved issue of Egypt's relations with Israel.

15:05It was to the shock of everyone in Egypt and abroad that Sadat took the unprecedented initiative with very little warning of hopping on an airplane and flying to Israel in his willingness to demonstrate the seriousness with which Egypt would pursue a genuine peace with Israel. And that caught Menachem Begin completely by surprise and left him responding to events that he did not initiate. So Eugene, paint us a portrait of Anwar Sadat. We've come across him briefly before, but give us the backstory on this extraordinary man who's upended the apple cart by taking this unprecedented move. It's such a good question.

15:47And I'm going to bring a little personal reflection to bear here, because I was actually in high school in Cairo at the time of Sadat's visit to Jerusalem. And having grown up between Beirut and Cairo, in which no one ever spoke of Israel as such, but just the Zionist entity, where everyone across the Arab world had grown up being indoctrinated to see Israel as the enemy. It was just an unprecedented shock to see the Egyptian president board an airplane and fly to Israel. Distances are nothing. They're so close. An El Al, apart from anything else. It was an Israeli aircraft that took him there.

16:24It was unbelievable to sit with my Egyptian friends watching television and not being able to discern whether Sadat had just proved that he was a hero or a traitor. And he was an unreadable man. You ask for a portrait of him. He is a pious man from a village in the Nile Delta who had risen through the military, was one of the founders of the revolutionary movement in Egypt in 1952. He's dark-skinned in a society where darkness carries social stigma too, isn't he? He's not the poster boy in the way that Nasser was. He certainly didn't have that kind of movie star handsomeness to him that really made people fall for Nasser in a big way.

17:08But more than just his dark complexion, Will, you'll remember that he had a dark spot on his forehead. His zabiba, or raisin as it's called in Arabic, is a sign of a pious Muslim's frequent prayer. Piety. A man whose head has hit the ground so often during prayer. Right, yeah. This is someone who prays five times a day to his God. And it was a big part of Sadat's appeal to Egyptians, was that like them, his Islamic fate is something he would wear on his forehead. I mean, I've been sort of obsessed with Sadat because he's a man of such contradictions. You know, on the one hand, Islam is clearly one of his great motivating factors.

17:46But we're also told that, you know, he has these two great loves, Gandhi and Hitler. Two people you would not put in the same elevator in a building. But he reads them, we're told, obsessively when he's a young man. And the reason he likes to read them and reread them is because he loved Gandhi's non-violent resistance to British colonialism, which was successful. And he was also attracted to Hitler's method of driving the British out of Egypt by force. So you've got all of these sort of conflicting pressures on him. What does that sort of mould him into? Is that, you know, you've described how Begin could hold an audience in the palm of his hand.

18:24Sadat was not that man, was he? No, Sadat really was not the person whose speeches filled city squares. And so he had to find his appeal to the Egyptian people. I mean, first off, it was by prosecuting a successful war effort. And you've had the time to discuss 1973, but it really did make him the hero of the crossing in Egyptian propaganda. And that propaganda was picked up by the Egyptian people. The Cairo I moved to 1975, still addressed their president as the hero of the crossing. And they still, what do they call the 1973 war? It's still regarded as a victory, despite the rest of the world regards it as another Arab defeat.

19:02Well, if you went to the military museum in the citadel of Cairo, next to the Muhammad Ali mosque, I just remember going there as a high school kid, and it was full of all the wrecked tanks and airplane that had been destroyed by the Egyptians in the course of the war. They had visible, tangible evidence to make the claim that they'd given the Israelis a thrashing, and then they neglect the way Sharon outflanks them, surrounds them, and forces them into a surrender, essentially, in the Western desert. But yes, I mean, his credibility is raised by that. And so, what he lacks in charisma, he is able to make up for by having been the hero of the crossing, but also he's bold and he's decisive.

19:45And that was what left Egyptians confused by his decision to fly to Israel and address the Israeli Knesset, in a sense going over the head of an Israeli prime minister who was seen as an obstruction to making peace, to speak directly to the Israeli people. And I think most Israelis responded to Sadat precisely because they saw him as someone speaking to them. Yeah, but I mean, he also rises above the heads of most of the Arab world, because let's not forget, I mean, you know, it wasn't so long ago we were talking to you about the Arab world saying, no, no, no, we will not recognize Israel. We will not speak to Israel.

20:23We will not allow Israel to exist as a new state here. So how does the Arab world react to him and to this? Well, you can imagine the chorus of no's that follows Sadat's initiative. Particularly by the Palestinians, we should say. And Arafat is absolutely livid, isn't he? Oh, absolutely. But the first person he turns to before making his trip is actually Hafez al-Assad in Syria, who had been his ally and partner in prosecuting the 1973 war. And Assad says to him, don't do this, my friend. You know, this will weaken our common Arab front. There's a way for us to achieve the goal of peace by staying together.

21:05If you go, you're going to be on your own. And that was exactly as it turned out to be. In going to address the Israeli people, he set change in motion. But among the changes was a universal rejection of Egypt's initiative and an immediate warning that should Egypt continue down the road towards negotiating and concluding an agreement with the Israelis, that it would lead to Egypt's exclusion from the Arab League and its isolation by all other Arab countries. They were literally going to boycott Egypt. And that's not a small threat because you have to remember the Arab League, its seat is in Cairo.

21:41Egypt is, in a sense, still in the leadership position of the Arab world. Yeah, that's something we forget today, when Egypt is poorer and more marginal than it was then. Egyptian movies are watched all over the Arab world. Egyptian film stars are the big heroes everywhere. And Egypt is seen as glamorous and a place where people go on holiday. And it's the intellectual center of the Arab world in a way that it perhaps no longer is. The pyramids, the Kit Kat club, you know, it was high fashion. It was cool. Soft power, hard power, economic power, military power. No, Egypt was the heavyweight of the Middle East.

22:16It was the center of gravity. So I think, you know, you talk about the three no's of Khartoum, they're still being respected by most of the Arab countries. Sadat's given a clear choice. You continue down this road by yourself. And if you lead it to its logical conclusion and conclude a separate peace with Israel, you're on your own, brother. We will totally cut you off. One crucial thing that we shouldn't miss out here is the Soviet factor. Now, Russia is providing all the weapons to Egypt at this point. And one of the things that's been very successful in the 1973 war has been the SAM anti-aircraft systems, which shot down a great number of Israeli aircraft in a way that hadn't happened in 1967.

22:54And Sadat has now cooled on the Soviet alliance. He's suspicious of the Russians. This is one of the reasons that he makes this move. We should also say, you know, actually, Egypt is thick. It's awash with Soviets. They're all over the place. They're in very high positions. They're advisors. They've got a massive presence. So, yes, just to pick up from what Willy said, he's suspicious. What does he do? And why does he do it? Well, remember that Sadat had run cold on the Soviets before 1973 and had expelled all Soviet... 72, he kicks them out, doesn't he? Yeah. He expels all Soviet advisors. Because in a sense, as you've said, Anita, they were a very large presence.

23:35They threw their way around in a way that, for Sadat and his high command, felt a little imperial. Right. And they were resentful of the intrusiveness of their Soviet advisors, who might be bringing high-tech gear to Egypt, but wouldn't let the Egyptians put their finger on the button. So, Sadat, in many ways, is I think the second point is he was a very effective player in the Cold War, in playing the Soviets against the Americans or the Americans against the Soviets. Was there any sense, Eugene, in which he'd warmed up the Americans to what he was going to do? Because what we do see, of course, is a shift towards America.

24:17America, after this, is providing the Egyptian weaponry and a huge aid package too. Is there any sense which that was prepared before he flies to Jerusalem or not? Absolutely. Because what we've left out of our analysis, of course, is in the immediate aftermath of the 73 war, the Americans take seriously Egypt as a military threat. And they help broker a disengagement agreement between the Egyptians and the Israelis. It leads to a retreat of Israeli forces away from the east bank of the Suez Canal, allows for the clearing of the canal to be restored to international shipping. and is the first example of a new respect for Egypt after the successes it enjoyed at the start of the October War and the Americans beginning to take this Egyptian administration seriously.

25:07But for Egypt, they also had, in the course of the war, they knew how reliant they were on Soviet weapons, particularly air defense, but they had seen how much better American kit was. And so they were looking to make a shift of patrons away from the Soviets towards the Americans. And that whole Sinai disengagement period in the mid-1970s, before you get the flight to Israel and launching the Camp David process, is a period where the Americans and the Egyptians are beginning to sound each other out with a newfound respect. And ideas being that there might be a shift in this Cold War, away from being a client of the Soviet Union, to working more directly with the United States.

25:48So, I mean, the visit itself, we should spend some time talking about this because it happens on November the 19th, 1977. And he does get some respect as an Israeli guard of honor that greets him. Tell us a bit more about, you know, the visual, the optics, as we like to say in politics these days, the optics of that visit, Eugene. Again, remember for the Israeli people that Egypt, the most populous Arab nation, the most heavily armed Arab nation, the most serious foe that Israel faces in the region, to be able to make peace with Egypt would be to ensure the security of the Jewish state forevermore.

26:26There would not be an Arab war against Israel that could threaten Israel if Egypt wasn't a part of it. So seeing Sadat get off the airplane on their territory was, for many in Israel, the fulfillment of a dream. It is recognition. It is acceptance. It is the willingness to take Egypt's desire for peace to the Israeli state itself. And so, you know, in a sense, if we thought he wasn't charismatic to Egyptian audiences, I think for Israeli audiences, he was an absolute charm. I think that they were so open to him. And he was very courteous towards them. He held himself with respect, and he showed respect to his hosts in Israel.

27:09He was very dapper, wasn't he? For all that he wasn't this sort of movie star, he was quite vain and sort of theatrical too. He was, and he understood the drama of the moment and he played to it. And he used that to be able to put a hard message to the Israeli people when he took to the rostrum at the Knesset to make his case. And his case was, there is benefit to both of us to ending our state of war. But peace will not come for free. And remember, at this point, Israel is still in occupation of large parts of the Sinai Peninsula, even after the disengagement. And building settlements there. And there were settlements in the Sinai that were ideologically motivated by zealous Zionists looking to establish the largest footprint for the state of Israel.