Word: arabism
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Palestinian terrorism and the Israeli invasion of Lebanon did not wreck the Sadat peace initiative entirely, they may have diverted it toward the very thing the Palestinians most fear: a separate peace between Egypt and Israel. Sadat is more isolated from his Arab brothers than ever, and probably angrier too; he was enraged almost beyond reason by the Palestinian murder of his friend Editor Youssef Sebai in Cyprus last month, and he fully recognized the effect of recent P.L.O. terrorism on his peace initiative...
...earlier times of trouble, Egypt has seen itself as the protector of the Arabs against Israel; in fact, it became involved in the 1967 war partly because of a real or imagined threat by Israel against Syria. All that is changed now. Last week, when Israel invaded another Arab state, Lebanon, there was no talk of mobilizing the Egyptian armed forces, and the Egyptian President at first criticized the Israeli action with notable restraint. It all bore out what influential Egyptians have been saying for weeks: "No more Egyptian blood will be shed for Palestinians...
...Palestinians perceive the situation, by charging into Lebanon the Israelis have lost whatever chance they had of gaining Arab recognition beyond what they have already received from Cairo. If Israeli retaliation against Palestinian terrorism grows more ruthless, the Palestinians argue, Jerusalem will gradually lose its remaining Western support...
...pressures on the Egyptian President have seriously increased, even as the chances have diminished that he will be able to fulfill his role as catalyst for a comprehensive settlement embracing all the Arab nations that remain in a state of war with Israel. Some observers are convinced, however, that the P.L.O. raid and the Israeli reprisal are part of an inevitable chain of events that is pulling Sadat toward making a separate peace with Israel...
That problem is how to satisfy the Palestinian demand for some form of nationhood. They remain a homeless people, "the Jews of the Arab world." They have their freedom fighters: the fedayeen. Palestinian guerrillas divided into six major groups that form the Palestine Liberation Organization, a kind of shadow government headed by Yasser Arafat. But they have little else. Israelis maintain that, as former Premier Golda Meir once put it, "there is no such thing as a Palestinian." Many of them carry no more proof of citizenship than the laisser-passer that have been issued to residents of the refugee...