Peace [antikvár]

Introduction In a world prone to sudden, radical political upheavals whose repercussions extend far beyond the borders of any one state, we have come to place a very high prenniunn upon the virtue of stability. The irony, of course, is that in their craving for stability nations, like individuals, can sometimes grow resigned to even admittedly unpalatable political situations and find themselves falling into line with the kind of thinking that cautions: "Better the devil you know than the devil you don't." In the case of the Middle East, by the latter half of the 1970s the status quo of "no war, no peace"—essentially an imprecise and somewhat cosmetic version of what was in fact "sometimes war but never peace"—had begun to become something of a comfortably familiar situation, while peace had taken on the quality of a vague metaphor that seemed about as realistic and attainable as the vision of the "End of Days." Israel and her neighbors had been locked in a pattern of negative expectations for so long that only a uniquely dramatic step could have broken its hold over them. President Sadat's declaration that he would go even to Jerusalem in the pursuit of peace, and Prime Minister Begin's invitation to him to do so, was precisely the kind of jolt necessary to startle the Middle East out of its sense of easy familiarity with the status quo. No other move or stage in the subsequent months of negotiations ever matched those opening days of the peace initiative for sheer drama and emotion. Yet even such "shock treatment" would have had only limited therapeutic effect had it not been followed by a period in which both sides had an opportunity to examine and revise many of their firmly imbedded assumptions about themselves and each other. When President Sadat offered to go to Jerusalem and Prime Minister Begin reciprocated with an invitation, the governments of both countries could well afford to enter into the peace venture by calculating their fallback positions and asking themselves philosophically "What have we got to lose?" During the succeeding rounds of negotiations, however, both sides were forced to alter their outlook and seriously begin to consider the far more complex yet enticing prospect of what they had to gain.