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Israel had built up an arsenal of sophisticated arms, including nuclear weapons, that beggared the Arab military potential. General Mohamed Abdel Ghany Gamassy, Egypt's Minister of War and overall commander of the armed forces, told Sadat that if war broke out, his army would be devastated. Because of Sadat's frosty relations with Moscow, there was no longer a Soviet supply link; Egyptian forces had slipped badly in relation to the Israelis since the strike across the Suez in 1973. Now Cairo began to hear rumors that Menachem Begin was ready to use his hardware for a pre-emptive "war of annihilation" against Arab armies if the U.S. began putting too much pressure on Israel. Sadat's "American connection" carried with it an ominous danger.
In late October Gamassy and his commanders urged Sadat to push hard for a peace settlement; the military, which is the anchor of Sadat's domestic support, pledged to back any move he cared to make. But if Carter's hand was indeed stayed by the U.S. pro-Israeli lobby, there seemed no obvious leverage with which to seek Israeli concessions. To the chagrin of Washington and the outrage of most Arabs, Begin's government had encouraged new settlements in the occupied territories. All told, there are now 51 Jewish settlements on the West Bank, 19 in the Sinai, and 26 on the Golan Heights. The U.S. maneuvered for a Geneva peace conference, but the process degenerated into procedural nitpicking, much of it on the key issue of who would represent the Palestinians. Sadat believed that if everyone continued quibbling over what he called "a word here, a comma there," he would not get to Geneva for months; peace might be delayed for years. High-level diplomats think Sadat also had another fear; at Geneva, his moderate position might be outvoted by the Russians, who hate him, and by hard-lining Syrians and Palestinians.
And so the Egyptian was led to his historic leap of imagination. It represented such a total change in Arab behavior that at first no one believed that Sadat meant what he said. In a speech on Nov. 9 to the Egyptian parliament, Sadat declared: "There is no time to lose. I am ready to go to the ends of the earth if that will save one of my soldiers, one of my officers, from being scratched. I am ready to go to their house, to the Knesset, to discuss peace with the Israeli leaders."
Almost everyone assumed that the statement was only a rhetorical flourish. Despite numerous secret contacts over the years, it had been uniform Arab policy not to deal publicly with Israeli leaders. During the time of the British mandate in Palestine, Arab leaders would never sit at the negotiating table with their Zionist counterparts. After the creation of Israel in 1948, the boycott was even more thorough. At the Arab-Israeli Lausanne conference of 1949, the two sides stayed in separate hotels, never saw one another, and communicated only through couriers. When Lebanon's Charles Malik was president of the U.N. General Assembly, he once strayed into the Israeli pavilion at an international fair and drank a champagne toast. He was photographed in the act and was savagely attacked throughout the Arab world.
Early this year Sadat himself