Thirty years ago this week, Egyptian President Anwar el-Sadat was gunned down in Cairo — his reward for making peace with Israel. Arab leaders took note.
Does anyone truly wonder why so few of Israel’s neighbors have stepped up to make peace since then?
Certainly, none’s come forward — not in earnest, anyway — from Gaza or the West Bank, where warring killers and kleptocrats rule the day. Or from Lebanon, where Hezbollah has established its own terror state.
Or from Syria, whose regime instead has been threatening a new war with the Jewish state, in a dangerously cynical ploy to redirect its citizens’ dissent.
Not even from today’s Egypt itself, where military leaders now speak openly of abandoning the hard-won peace.
And therein lies Sadat’s other lesson: He was able to drag Egypt to Camp David only because he held a monopoly on violence — that is, he had the backing of his army and control over his population.
For a while, anyway.
Ditto for his successor, Hosni Mubarak, who kept the country quiet nearly 30 years.
Egypt today, by contrast, is a free-for-all, where the extremist Muslim Brotherhood is bearing down and nominally democratic protests give way to anti-Semitic riots, like last month’s attack on the Israeli embassy.
No real peace process is possible amid that kind of instability — or where extremists can easily exercise the assassin’s veto.
That’s true not only in post-Mubarak Egypt but also in the Palestinian territories, which focus their energies on destroying Israel rather than building their own state.
Make no mistake: Sadat and Mubarak weren’t saints but typical Mideast strongmen. Yet the alternative — chaos, unchecked extremism — may be worse.
And aggression will only grow, absent brave leaders — as is the case now: This week, Egyptians used the Sadat anniversary to celebrate Egypt’s 1973 Yom Kippur War with Israel, rather than Sadat’s peace-making. Their temporary leader took special note of how Sadat “confidently took the decision to go to war.” How nice.
Perhaps one day, a leader with Sadat’s courage, and support, will again emerge in the region. Until then, don’t expect peace.