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On the Arab side, the reactions were even more disparate. A few states were stunned—Morocco, Oman, and the Sudan, which had been Sadat's closest ally and, like Egypt, had suffered from Libya's belligerency. But in Libya, happy flag-waving crowds shouted their approval. In Lebanon, Palestinian commandos danced in the streets as if celebrating a victory. "We shake the hand that pulled the trigger," said one fedayeen commander. Palestine Liberation Organization Leader Yasser Arafat, who was in Peking, declared: "What we are witnessing is the beginning of the failure of the Camp David agreement with the fall of one of its symbols." A number of other Arab governments were outwardly unsympathetic but inwardly troubled. The Saudis broke with Sadat over Camp David but still saw him as a counterweight to the regimes in Syria and Iraq, with whom they are united only by their opposition to Israel. Both Syria's President Hafez Assad and Jordan's King Hussein are vulnerable to the kind of Muslim fanaticism that brought down Iran and troubles Egypt. As one Western diplomat said of Assad and Hussein, "They won't be reviewing military parades for a while."
The real perceptions of the Arabs, and particularly the Palestinians, toward Sadat are exceedingly complex. Leaving aside Gaddafi (as well as that non-Arab Muslim fanatic to the east, Iran's Ayatullah Khomeini, who late last week called on Egyptians to overthrow "the dead Pharaoh's successors" and replace his government with a Khomeini-style Islamic republic), the Arabs felt betrayed by Sadat. What was statesmanship to the West was treason in their eyes. Of course, they envied him: they could not forgive him for getting back more Arab land by negotiating than they had achieved by other means. They were impatient; his patience seemed boundless. They felt he had given away his soul for the Sinai; he maintained to his death that he had never signed a separate peace. They were angered by his trip to Jerusalem; even more, they resented his unwillingness to change course when the autonomy talks seemed to be going nowhere. They blamed him for the Israeli raid on the Iraqi reactor last June, which took place just three days after Sadat and Begin had talked in the Sinai. Either Sadat had approved the raid on Arab territory, they said, or he had been duped by the Israelis.
"He gave away so much in return for nothing," said Musa Mazzawi, a Palestinian spokesman who lives in London. Explained another distinguished Palestinian, Edward Said of Columbia University: "After Camp David, the Israeli annexation of Jerusalem was assured, the settlements on the West Bank increased, and the destruction of Lebanon and its people continued with even greater ferocity by Israeli troops and warplanes. The rule of the Israelis on the West Bank became even more oppressive. The setback to the Palestinian people by the treaty was incalculable. All of this happened after Camp David, and so it is hard to reconcile the realities with the praise that is being showered on Sadat by the Western media."