The Road to Camp David • 363receive the Egyptian president at any time. Arrangements were made
hastily, and on 19 November 1977 Sadat flew to Israel. The next day he de¬
livered before the Knesset a speech that was carried to most of the world by
radio and television. He offered the Israelis peace with Egypt if they with¬
drew from all lands they had occupied in the 1967 war and recognized a
Palestinian state. Many people thought that Sadat's visit was so dramatic
a step toward peace that Israel should have offered comparable concessions
to Egypt. But no other Arab leader wanted the reconciliation with Israel
that Sadat offered; Qadhafi and Arafat called him a traitor to the Arab
cause. Israel was willing to make peace with Egypt, but Sadat wanted a
comprehensive settlement including Syria, Jordan, and the Palestinians.
To follow up on his Jerusalem visit, Sadat called a general conference in
December 1977; however, as only Israel and the US agreed to come to
Cairo, it ended inconclusively. Yet the Egyptian people, burdened by heavy
state military expenditures, saw peace with Israel as a first step toward their
economic recovery. Begin flew to Ismailia to meet with Sadat, and they
agreed on concurrent negotiations: military talks in Cairo and political
ones in Jerusalem. By the time they began in January, though, both sides
cared less about peace and worried more about each other's motives. Be-
gin's insistence that Jewish settlements on the West Bank and industrial
towns in the Sinai must stay under Israeli army protection reminded Sadat
of British efforts to keep their Suez base before 1956, so he pulled his nego¬
tiators out of Jerusalem.
Israel and Egypt also differed on how to resolve the Palestinian issue. Be¬
gin offered self-rule (with an indeterminate Israeli occupation) to the Arabs
in the occupied areas. Sadat wanted self-determination for the Palestinian
people. How could Begin expect Sadat to accept indefinite Israeli control
over the Palestinians, when the Arabs had struggled for most of the century
to free themselves from foreign rule? How could Sadat expect Begin, who
believed that God had promised the West Bank to the Jews, to commit his
government to give that land to the Palestinians, who had not recognized
Israel's right to exist? Jewish Israelis did not care to admit that Palestinian
Arabs wanted freedom as much as they did, whereas Egypt (and the other
Arab countries) did not realize how Israel's concern for security resulted
from Jewish fears of extinction after the Nazi Holocaust and years of ten¬
sion due to the Arab-Israeli conflict. Yet one could reasonably argue that re¬
taining and settling the occupied territories, then containing more than two
million discontented Palestinians, only increased Israel's insecurity.
Such tunnel vision was tragic, for both sides needed peace. The burden
of military expenditures was becoming unbearable. Some Israelis were
moving to other countries because they were tired of the confiscatory taxes,