(2 of 4)
The danger was real that in the very process of organizing the conference the most radical elements would achieve a veto, since no progress could take place without them. In turn, the Soviet Union would be able to exercise a veto over any plausible moderate solution. All the while, Israel, maddened by isolation and the fear of an imposed peace, would withdraw into sullen intransigence. Progress at Geneva would have depended on American pressure on Israel to a degree probably incompatible with U.S. domestic political realities. We ran the risk of being caught between the parties: accused by the Arab side of insufficient exertions and by Israel of excessive pressures. The Soviet Union would have gained an increasing voice as the frustration of all parties came to focus on us. Egypt—the most eager for peace of the Arab countries, yet treated as just one of a number of participants—was threatened with being reduced to passivity, with losing control over its destiny in a welter of unmanageable and unpredictable claims.
Considerations such as these must have been in President Sadat's mind when he decided to cut through the Geneva minuet that was getting as complicated as it was irrelevant, and go to the heart of the problem—the psychological gulf that had separated Israelis and Arabs since the creation of the Jewish state.
In a recurring irony of history, the Jewish people, persecuted and ostracized for centuries, found itself again condemned to a ghetto existence of international isolation at the very moment when it had built its own state. The Arabs, their pride stung by the creation of Israel and convinced from the beginning that Israel was occupying their national territories, had refused to accept the very existence of the Jewish state. This created a vicious circle: Israel saw security in purely geographic concessions as the price of a legitimacy that diplomacy turned into legal formulas so esoteric as to be almost meaningless. Intermediaries could help to a certain point. They could lay a foundation. But no nation or leader will ever be totally certain whether an intermediary's account of the views of the opposing side reflects reality, gullibility, or his own preference. The mere fact that an intermediary was necessary, that direct talks were rejected, reflected and fueled the prevailing distrust.
By going to Jerusalem, President Sadat cut through the mindset of a generation. He allowed the people of Israel to judge for themselves his commitment to peace; he could see for his part the trauma of a people that had never known a day without war in its national existence. Sadat was right that the heart of the problem was psychological. By grasping the essence of the issue, Sadat has done more to resolve it than all the wars and negotiations of the last three decades. Matters in the Middle East now can be reduced to a few fundamentals: