TEL AVIV, 18 August 2003 — Sometimes a single sentence is enough to reveal a person’s mental world and intellectual profundity. Such a sentence was uttered by Shaul Mofaz, the minister of defense, some days ago during a visit to the Israeli troops in the Gaza Strip.

“With our enemies, it seems, no shortcuts are possible. Egypt made peace with Israel only after it was defeated in the Yom Kippur War. That will happen with the Palestinians, too.”

This means that there is no political solution. There is only war, and in this war we must “defeat” the Palestinians. A simple, simplistic, not to say primitive, view.

But the revealing sentence is: “Egypt made peace with Israel only after it was defeated in the Yom Kippur War”.

Revealing, because it utterly contradicts the almost unanimous view of all the experts in Israel and around the world — historians, Arabists and military commentators. These believe that the exact opposite is true: Anwar Sadat was able to lead Egypt toward peace only because he was admired as the commander who had defeated Israel in the Yom Kippur War. Only after the Egyptian people had won back their national pride were they able to consider peace with the enemy (with us).

When the war broke out, the Egyptians did something that amazed the world and shook Israel: They crossed the Suez Canal and overcame the celebrated “Bar-Lev line”. Everybody considered this a brilliant military feat. The stupidity of Israeli Army intelligence and the arrogant complacency of Prime Minister Golda Meir allowed the Egyptians to achieve total surprise, destroy a large number of tanks and pin down the Israeli Air force. Minister of Defense Moshe Dayan was in shock and talked about the “destruction of the third Jewish state”. (In traditional Jewish historiography, the first two Jewish states are symbolized by the first and second temple in Jerusalem.)

In the course of the war, the tide turned and, in the end, the Israeli Army crossed the Canal into Egypt. At the end of the war, Israeli troops were established on the western shore, but large Egyptian forces remained to their rear, on the eastern side. This week a long-delayed official study by the Israeli Army was leaked. It declares unequivocally that Israel had “not won that war”.

But the professional military analysis is not so important in this context. What is important is how the events appear to the Egyptian consciousness and affect their actions since then.

I succeeded in reaching Cairo on the morrow of Sadat’s sensational visit to Jerusalem, and found myself in a city drunk with joy, in some kind of delirious popular carnival. Over the main streets stretched hundreds of slogans celebrating the act of the president. Every commercial corporation felt duty-bound to hang such a slogan with a peace message.

The one slogan that outnumbered all others was “Anwar Sadat: Hero of War and Peace”.

The Egyptian people would not have supported peace, if they had considered it a surrender to the diktat of an arrogant enemy. Only the crossing of the canal four years earlier, which Egyptians consider one of the greatest victories in all the 8000 years of their history, enabled them to accept the agreement as a compromise between equals, without loss of honor. Like many other nations, the Egyptians — and all other Arabs — consider national dignity the most important treasure.

Perhaps Mofaz should go to Cairo and visit the round building that houses the museum of the Ramadan War (as Arabs call the Yom Kippur War). There he will see an exciting, emotion-laden display of the crossing of the canal. Every day the place is thronged with people, especially school children.

If one wants to draw a parallel between the Egyptians and the Palestinians, as Mofaz tries to do, the conclusion would be: Only after the Palestinians win back their national self-respect, will they be able to make peace with Israel. The first intifada, which Palestinians consider a victorious struggle against the immense might of the Israeli Army, allowed them to accept the Oslo agreement. Only the second intifada, which has already proved that the Israeli Army cannot subdue the Palestinian uprising, enabled them to accept the road map, which is supposed to bring about peace between the Israeli and the coming Palestinian state.

The Yom Kippur War did not lead to the “destruction of the third state”, as Dayan had prophesied, but to peace with Egypt, after its national honor had been restored. If Sharon and the army command succeed in disrupting the hudna (truce) and bring about the renewal of the intifada, they will not break the Palestinians, who will refuse to submit. And after large-scale bloodshed, Yasser Arafat will make a speech in the Knesset, as did Sadat, the “Hero of War and Peace”.

— Uri Avnery is an Israeli journalist and peace activist. His essays are included in The Other Israel: Voices of Refusal and Dissent.