Sadat and the Egyptian–Israeli Peace Revisited

Abstract

With the resumption of the search for an Arab–Israeli settlement, analysts have been debating the factors that have frustrated it for so many years. The fact that one Arab country, namely Egypt, concluded a peace treaty with Israel almost a decade and a half ago led some to reexamine that case to see what made it possible. The available literature on Egypt's disengagement from the Arab–Israeli conflict has been voluminous, as many policy makers and analysts in Egypt, Israel, the rest of the Arab world, and the United States published their accounts of this development. Despite many ideological and political differences among these writers, they all concluded that this foreign-policy shift represented a radical alteration of Arab policies toward Israel and that with Egypt out of the war equation, the regional balance of power had changed dramatically. Many of them also emphasized the centrality of President Sadat's role in explaining Egypt's exit from the conflict with Israel. One or another of Sadat's personal characteristics has been singled out by his admirers and critics alike as being the main factor behind the Egyptian foreign-policy shift. It is not that they considered other factors such as socioeconomic variables and regional or global structures irrelevant. They simply assessed them as not decisive in terms of their relative explanatory power.