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Radical terrorism remained an affliction of the Western democracies, but one battle was won in that war. West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt bravely outplayed the Palestinian terrorists who skyjacked a Lufthansa airliner in October, saving the lives of 86 with a commando attack at Mogadishu, Somalia. Soon afterward, however, the body of Industrialist Hanns-Martin Schleyer, who had been kidnaped by Baader-Meinhof gangsters six weeks earlier, was found in the trunk of an abandoned car in France.
Yet it was the Middle East that gripped the world's attention for much of the year. And it was Anwar Sadat who caught the world's imagination by his diplomatic coup de théātre. In retrospect, there should not have been too much surprise that it was Sadat, of all the Middle East's leaders, who moved in an unexpected way to get peace negotiations stirring again. Sadat is a far more vigorous and visionary statesman than has been generally perceived. And he has shown in the past that he is capable of surprises. In 1971, which he boldly and perhaps foolishly declared would be a "year of decision" for the Middle East, he offered to search for a peace settlement with Israel—a proposal that the Jerusalem government of Premier Golda Meir turned aside. The following year he abruptly evicted Soviet military advisers and experts from Egypt in a gesture toward the West that Washington failed to follow up. Then in October 1973 he caught Israel off guard with his Yom Kippur attack across the Suez. All these events, like his mission to Jerusalem, appear to have been dictated by a powerful and almost desperate internal logic.
Sadat not only wants peace but profoundly needs it. Egypt, disastrously impoverished and overpopulated, claustrophobically crowded into the life-sustaining Nile Valley, can no longer afford to spend 28% of its national budget on military hardware to aim at Israel. Egypt is also deeply weary of fighting. In the four bloody wars against Israel (1948, 1956, 1967, 1973), Egypt, of all the Arab states, has absorbed the heaviest losses. In '67 Egypt lost 3,000 killed, v. 600 for the Syrians and 696 for the Jordanians. Today the Nile Valley nationalism always present in the Egyptian character is asserting itself against the larger, Pan-Arab idea. Over and over Egyptian army officers repeat: "No more Egyptian blood will be shed for the Palestinians." That does not mean that Sadat intends to sell out the Palestinians. But he may be willing to ignore Yasser Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization if he works out what he feels is a fair solution to the Palestinian problem, and the P.L.O. refuses to accept it.
Ironically, Sadat started his peace campaign by going to war. The road to peace in the autumn of 1973 seemed totally blocked. Both Arabs and Israelis stared down diplomats as impassively as gunfighters. The U.S. and the Soviets were preoccupied with