The Night an Enemy Landed in Jerusalem
On November 19, 1977, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat landed in Israel — the first Arab leader ever to visit the Jewish state — setting the Middle East on the road to its first peace treaty.
Ten days earlier, on November 9, 1977, Anwar Sadat had stunned Egypt's People's Assembly with an offer no one believed he meant. For the sake of peace, he said, he was prepared to go to the ends of the Earth — "and Israel will be surprised to hear me tell you: I am ready to go to their home, to their Knesset itself." The chamber gave him a standing ovation. Nobody thought he would actually go.
He went. Israel's Prime Minister Menachem Begin extended a formal invitation through Washington on November 15, and Sadat accepted at once. On the evening of November 19, 1977, his plane touched down at Ben Gurion Airport. Begin and Israeli President Ephraim Katzir waited on the tarmac; a 21-gun salute fired in Sadat's honor. The two countries were still technically at war, and no Arab leader had ever set foot in Israel in its 29 years of existence. When the visit was announced on Israeli radio, people poured into the streets of Jerusalem, literally dancing. Some 2,000 journalists descended on the city. One woman told the Jerusalem Post: "I saw on TV the landing of the moon — it was nothing compared to this."
Not everyone cheered. Egypt's foreign minister, Ismail Fahmi, resigned two days before the trip, convinced it would destroy Egypt's standing in the Arab world. Syria accused Sadat of betrayal.
The next day, before all 120 members of the Knesset, Sadat spoke of permanent peace: "Today, I tell you and declare it to the whole world that we accept to live with you in permanent peace based on justice." He called the October 1973 war "the last war." During the visit he and Begin met at length — including a working dinner at Jerusalem's King David Hotel — and began the conversations that would become negotiations.
The visit broke a logjam that summits and wars had never broken. Within a year came the Camp David Accords of 1978, and on March 26, 1979, Sadat and Begin signed the Egypt–Israel peace treaty in Washington, witnessed by President Jimmy Carter. The two men shared the Nobel Peace Prize for it — the first peace treaty between Israel and an Arab state.
It all began with a plane landing on an airport tarmac on a November evening, and a leader willing to be called a traitor for the chance to end a war.
Photo: Government Press Office of Israel, CC BY-SA 3.0 (via Wikimedia Commons).
