Word: regional
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Canal Zone to Tel Aviv's Ben Gurion Airport, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat changed the course of Middle Eastern events for generations to come. More emphatically than anything that has happened there since the birth of Israel in 1948, his extraordinary pilgrimage transformed the political realities of a region blackened and embittered by impermeable hatreds and chronic war. In one stroke, the old rules of the Arab-Israeli blood feud no longer applied. Many of the endless hurdles to negotiation seemed to dissolve like Saharan mirages. Not in three decades had the dream of a real peace seemed more probable...
...horizons, ones already being discussed. In Cairo, Egyptians were speculating last week about an eventual unofficial alliance of Egypt, Israel and Iran that would link three countries with complementary economic assets: manpower, Western technology and oil wealth. For the first time, Egypt would have non-Arab allies in the region. The basis for such a partnership would be common opposition to extension of Soviet or leftist power in the Middle East?a reflection of Sadat's conviction that the real danger to him is represented by the Soviet Union, not Israel...
Before Sadat flew to Israel, the Middle East appeared to be on another of its terrible swings toward war, another violent spasm in the tragic politics of the region. But by one act, the Egyptian President has broken through the seemingly predestined cycle of hatred and killing. Not since the founding of Israel in 1948 has the will for peace in the Middle East been stronger. If his specific initiative proves unfruitful, there remains a danger that both sides might once again gear up for war. And yet it seems unlikely that the past's bitter patterns of stagnation...
...Middle East, of course, is strewn with the ruins of old hopes for peace?colonial commissions, the corpses of assassinated mediators, United Nations resolutions signed but unhonored. Despite the euphoric glow last week in Cairo and Jerusalem, no one who has long watched the region's affairs was likely to announce: "Peace is at hand." Anwar Sadat had headily mixed statesmanship and showmanship, but that is a volatile combination. The very headlong momentum that Sadat had forced raised the question of whether he was practicing a durable diplomacy...
Sadat, of course, had every reason to take pride in his initiative. Yet even though he had at least temporarily eclipsed Washington as the indispensable peacemaker in the Middle East, his breakthrough would not have been possible without the efforts by the U.S. to coax the region toward stability. Under Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, Henry Kissinger embarked upon the shuttle diplomacy that helped restore U.S. credibility in the Arab world, which had increasingly been heeding the Soviet call. And credit also belonged to Jimmy Carter. His activities and statements on the Middle East at times seemed erratic, but they...