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Anwar Sadat

Anwar Sadat (25 December 1918 to 6 October 1981) was president of Egypt from 1970 until his assassination, the man who launched the surprise attack that opened the Yom Kippur War in 1973 and, four years later, became the first Arab head of state to visit Israel and sign a peace treaty with it. He shared the 1978 Nobel Peace Prize with Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin for that treaty, and he was murdered by Islamist officers in his own army for making it. His life traces the two poles of the story: the war that nearly broke Israel and the peace that proved an Arab state could choose to end one.

Who he was

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Sadat was born in the village of Mit Abu al-Kum in the Nile Delta, one of thirteen children of a modest Egyptian clerk. He entered Egypt’s Royal Military Academy in 1936, where he met Gamal Abdel Nasser, and the two men’s careers stayed bound together for the next three decades. Sadat was jailed twice by the British for anti-colonial plotting during the Second World War, then joined Nasser’s Free Officers as they overthrew Egypt’s monarchy on 23 July 1952. He spent Nasser’s eighteen years in power as a loyal, largely overlooked lieutenant, vice president by the end, and few in Cairo or Washington expected him to matter much when he succeeded Nasser on Nasser’s death in September 1970. That misjudgment shaped the next decade.

What he did

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Sadat’s presidency has two hinge dates. On 6 October 1973, he sent Egyptian forces across the Suez Canal in a coordinated surprise attack with Syria, opening the war Israel calls the Yom Kippur War and Egypt calls the October War; the initial Egyptian crossing was a genuine tactical success that punctured Israel’s sense of invulnerability after the 1967 Six-Day War, even though the war ended with an Israeli counter-crossing into Egypt and the Egyptian Third Army encircled. Sadat treated the war less as a bid to destroy Israel than as a way to break the diplomatic deadlock: a display of Arab capability that could force the world, and Israel, to negotiate rather than dictate.

The second hinge came on 9 November 1977, when Sadat told Egypt’s parliament he was willing to go to Israel itself, even to the Knesset, to make peace. Israel extended the invitation and on 20 November 1977 Sadat landed in Tel Aviv, the first Arab head of state ever to set foot in Israel, and addressed the Knesset directly. He opened by invoking the God of “Muslims, Christians and Jews” and told the chamber that the psychological barrier between the two peoples was “70 percent of the whole problem.” The visit led, via US president Jimmy Carter’s mediation, to the Camp David Accords of 17 September 1978 and the Egypt-Israel peace treaty signed on the White House lawn on 26 March 1979, Israel’s first peace treaty with any Arab state. Israel returned the entire Sinai Peninsula, captured in 1967, in stages completed by 1982.

Where and why it mattered

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The treaty removed the largest Arab army from any future war coalition against Israel, a strategic fact that has held for nearly five decades: Egypt has not fought Israel since. It also broke the united Arab front that had insisted no separate peace was possible while the Palestinian question remained unresolved, the position frozen into the 1967 Khartoum Resolutions of “no peace, no recognition, no negotiation.” For that, the Arab League suspended Egypt’s membership and moved its headquarters out of Cairo for a decade, and most of the Arab world branded Sadat a traitor to the Palestinian cause, a charge his critics repeated for the rest of his life despite his insistence that the treaty’s companion framework called for Palestinian self-government in the West Bank and Gaza, a provision that went nowhere once Egypt and Israel had their own peace secured.

The contempt ran both ways. In February 1978, a Palestinian hit squad from the Abu Nidal splinter group assassinated Sadat’s personal friend Yusuf al-Sibai, editor of Al-Ahram, in Cyprus. Shlomo Ben-Ami, later Israel’s foreign minister, records that a furious Sadat told Israeli defense minister Ezer Weizman the Palestinians were “pygmies” and “hired killers.” The peace he built at Camp David months later was made over the objections of the leadership that had just murdered his friend, not with their blessing.

How it ended

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Sadat’s domestic standing collapsed even as his international stature rose. Economic strain, a crackdown on dissent in 1981 that jailed more than 1,500 opponents across the political spectrum, and above all the peace treaty itself fed an Islamist current inside Egypt that saw him as an apostate. On 6 October 1981, at the military parade in Cairo marking the eighth anniversary of the Suez crossing he had ordered, a cell of Egyptian Islamic Jihad officers in the reviewing procession opened fire and threw grenades at the reviewing stand. Sadat was killed instantly; several foreign dignitaries and Egyptian officials were wounded. One detail complicates the “killed for peace with Israel” shorthand: Ben-Ami notes that the assassin’s grievance at trial was Sadat’s Westernizing course as a whole, and that he did not mention Israel once. His successor, Hosni Mubarak, held the treaty with Israel but adopted a far warier, more passive regional posture than Sadat’s had been, a shift historians have linked to the chain of events that let the 1982 Lebanon war spiral and helped Hezbollah take root.

The myths and the record

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Sadat is claimed today by contradictory narratives. In parts of the Arab world he is still remembered as the man who sold out the Palestinians for a separate deal, ignoring that no Arab state before or since delivered anything closer to a Palestinian state through war, and that Sadat’s own 1973 war had already shown the limits of the military option. In the West he is sometimes flattened into a simple peacemaker, which erases that he was also the general who planned and executed a war designed to kill Israeli soldiers and reclaim territory by force, and that his peace came only after that war failed to achieve its maximal aims. The honest record holds both: a leader willing to fight when he judged it served Egypt, and willing to make an unprecedented, personally dangerous peace once he judged that fighting no longer did.

Section titled “Related pages”

Menachem Begin · Gamal Abdel Nasser · Who attacked first in the Yom Kippur War · Camp David Accords, 1978 · Six-Day War · Who started the wars

Sources

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