The Retreat from Camp David • 385teachers, doctors, engineers, skilled workers, and peasants who had jobs in
their countries and remitted their savings to Egypt. Their failure to do so
suggests that they needed Egyptian brains and brawn more than they
wanted to prove their ideological purity. Sadat expected the other Arab
states to come around to support Egypt's peace policy. Many would do so
later, but only Oman and the Sudan backed him in 1979.
If the other Arab states did not get on the peace bandwagon, part of the
blame fell on Israel's government, which exploited its deal with Egypt to
clamp down on the 2 million Arabs in Gaza, the West Bank, and the Golan
Heights. "Full autonomy," Prime Minister Begin explained, was to be ac¬
corded to the inhabitants of these occupied areas, provided the Palestini¬
ans gained no control over defense, the police, or even the water supply on
which their food and flocks depended. Jews were encouraged by subsi¬
dized mortgage loans to settle in these areas so that no outside power (let
alone the UN) could ever turn the lands over to the Arab majority.
Of course, the Palestine National Council (the PLO's executive arm)
thwarted the peace process, too, by its adherence to the 1964 charter call¬
ing for Arab control of all Palestine (meaning Israel's destruction). No one
knew what the PLO could do to force or persuade the Israelis to hand their
country, or even a part of what had been mandate Palestine, over to the
Palestinians. Could Israel somehow coerce or convince the Palestinians to
renounce the PLO? The two sides disagreed on how to make peace.
The Assassination of Sadat
The peace treaty with Israel raised the Egyptian people's hopes that some
money earmarked for defense could now be shifted into domestic pro¬
grams. The regained Sinai would become a new frontier for settlement and
development. Egypt at peace would draw Western investors and tourists,
another boost to economic recovery. The Arab boycott of Egypt, put in
place after Egypt signed the 1979 treaty, did not stop the country's eco¬
nomic revival. Although foreign investment was disappointing, earnings
from the sale of Egypt's oil, Suez Canal tolls, tourism revenues, and emi¬
grants' remittances did increase after the Camp David Accords, giving
Egypt a balance-of-payments surplus in 1980 for the first time in years.
This surplus did not recur, however, nor did growth benefit most of the
Egyptian people. Sadat was not interested in economic or social issues. His
open-door policy benefited only a small group of newly rich entrepreneurs.
The average Egyptian, squeezed by price inflation, housing costs, and de¬
teriorating public services, longed to move to North Africa or the Gulf
states. The villain was overpopulation. Egypt in 1982 had more than double