MIDDLE EAST: A Point of No Return

That Egyptian-Israeli treaty may be just down the road

Once again euphoria reigned as Egyptian and Israeli negotiators, under Washington's careful guidance, pushed ahead on a peace treaty between the two states. Said an optimistic Secretary of State Cyrus Vance late last week: "We have now resolved almost all the substantive issues." While in the U.S. on a fund-raising tour, Israeli Premier Menachem Begin said that "real progress" had been made and that he hoped to sign the treaty "quite soon, with God's help." Even customarily cautious Egyptian diplomats agreed with their Israeli counterparts that "the point of no return" had been reached on the three-week-old peace talks.

It has been a bumpy road to peace, and a few more jolts could lie ahead. Only a week earlier, the whole mood of negotiations darkened when Israel announced that it would expand the size of five Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank. That decision had given Egyptian President Anwar Sadat a strong excuse for pulling out of the negotiations if he had wanted to do so. Obviously he did not, even though Begin continued to talk defiantly, even provocatively, about Israel's goals. Accepting this year's Family of Man award from the New York Council of Churches, the Premier once again challenged the U.S. (and Arab) view that East Jerusalem is occupied land. "Jerusalem," he said, "is one city, indivisible, the eternal capital of Israel and of the Jewish people."

Sadat also was awarded a Family of Man medallion, just as he and Begin will share the Nobel Prize for Peace. In an acceptance speech read by former Premier Mamdouh Salem, he pointedly insisted that he went to Jerusalem and to Camp David "to establish peace for the entire area." Despite such oft-repeated assertions, both radical and moderate Arabs are concerned that Sadat has, in effect, sold out to Israel. Last week 20 Arab governments assembled in Baghdad in an effort to counteract the impending Egyptian-Israeli settlement.

The Arab states were as divided as ever. The Palestine Liberation Organization's de facto foreign minister, Farouk Kaddoumi, for instance, taunted the Saudis for their continued financial backing of Egypt. Unless the Arabs took joint action, he declared, "the Israelis will not stop until they have reached Mecca and seized your oil wealth." To which the Saudi Foreign Minister, Prince Saud al Faisal, replied tartly: "Mecca has a God to protect it. As for the oil, it has men defending it." By week's end the group had voted to raise $9 billion to strengthen Arab defenses against Israel, and sent a four-man delegation to meet Sadat in hopes of persuading him to give up his peace initiative. But Sadat refused to see them, declaring that "billions of dollars will not buy the will of Egypt. We have taken the difficult road to peace and we will not deviate from it."