Nation: Begin: It All Goes Back to Pharaoh

U.S. mediators talk publicly about the need to maintain the Middle East "peace process," but that phrase implicitly acknowledges how far away real peace is. Recently returned from the Middle East, TIME Diplomatic Correspondent Strobe Talbott offered this assessment:

American officials, both in Washington and along the shuttle route, privately describe their task as a holding action, a way of buying time while a discouraged Anwar Sadat and a defiant Menachem Begin learn to engage in the pragmatic diplomacy that last year's euphoric summitry made possible.

That holding action will probably have to last for a long time. For while Egypt's Sadat may recover from his discouragement, Begin's defiance seems to be a permanent condition, one that makes it extremely difficult to imagine the "peace process" producing a genuine and lasting peace any time soon.

Sadat has lately been wringing his hands about Israel's claimed right to defend its civilian settlements in the Sinai. In fact, Begin and his colleagues have left themselves considerable latitude to negotiate on that matter. The much more fundamental, probably insoluble problem is Begin's seeming commitment, passionately held and repeatedly articulated, to the incorporation into the Jewish state of what he calls the liberated territories of Judea and Samaria—and what most of the world, the U.S. included, calls the occupied territories of the West Bank.

It is that Zionist irredentism that distinguishes Begin from all preceding Israeli Premiers, and it is that policy that could make peace unattainable as long as he is in office. Golda Meir and Yitzhak Rabin were concerned with how long to postpone Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank. What Begin is talking about is how long to postpone Israeli annexation of the West Bank. Even if he offers to do so indefinitely, there is no way that any Arab leader can make peace with Israel on those terms.

Last year, when Begin's Likud coalition won its upset victory over the Labor Party, Washington hoped that Begin's ascent to power would temper the ideological fervor he had shown during his 30 years of opposition. As it turned out, Carter and his top aides hardly knew what a real ideologue was until they confronted Begin, and it took them a while to appreciate the phenomenon. When Foreign Minister Moshe Dayan, for instance, talks of his people and their struggle to survive, his terms of reference are the wars of 1948, 1956 and 1967, the crises he has personally known. Begin, by contrast, speaks with equal feeling not only about the Holocaust but about the Exodus and the destruction of Solomon's Temple. When Dayan talks about Egyptians, he regards them as the warriors who have fought the Jews over the past three decades. Begin views Sadat as heir to the pharaohs who enslaved the Jews almost four millenniums ago. His antipathy toward Arabs goes beyond politics.