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On a hill some three miles from downtown Cairo,
stands a simple state guest-house occasionally used by
President Sadat. Its principal feature is a wide
veranda which overlooks the Pyramids. The light con-
stantly changes the shape of these massive triangles
beaming against each other - a shape at once simple and
monumental is here as close to eternity as man can
reach by his own efforts. In no other country in the
world as in this sea of sand parted by the green valley
of the Nile stretching in a straight line for hundreds
of miles has man been so forced to teach himself humility
so exclusively by his own efforts. There is no natural
monument to dwarf him. And so the Egyptian has
tremendous edifices to teach himself the finiteness of
the human scale and yet to stretch its aspirations through
recorded history. Nowhere else are the most awe-

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inspiring sights man-made defying time and history and
human fallibility.

One wonders whether Sadat sat on that veranda as
he contemplated a move at once simple and tremendous, at
once dangerous and yet already fateful; his journey to
Jerusalem. Not far from this guest house Israeli and
Egyptian negotiators have been meeting for a week in
the Mena House. In keeping with the spirit of an area
where mirage and reality blend the negotiators are at
a bureaucratic level which guarantees that no progress
will be made until Prime Minister Begin and President
Sadat meet in Ismailia. But the presence of Israeli
diplomats in Cairo has lent itself to the symbolic
manifestations so dear to the Arab heart - to public
demonstrations equally significant whether they are
spontaneous or government-sponsored. They symbolize

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that two great peoples have met again as equals after a
march through the millenia. Both have suffered and
endured; both have been obsessed with permanence -- the
Egyptians in architecture and the Jews in the law. Both
have now embarked on the quest for that most elusive of
all permanencies: a lasting peace.

And these two eternity-obsessed nations have a good
chance of realizing their dreams. The very audacity of
Sadat's act -- like the arrogance of building the
artificial mountains which are the Pyramids -- dwarfs
the calculations of the recent past. Ups and downs are
inevitable; there will be complicated negotiations; but
the parties have fated themselves to success.

One need only compare the situation of a month
ago with that obtaining on the eve of the meeting in
Ismailia. Then preparations were being pressed for a

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Geneva conference distrusted alike by Egypt and Israel.

Major procedural problems were unresolved: the relation
of the plenary to the working groups, the nature of
Palestinian participation, the precise role of the Soviet
Union. A procedural deadlock was near certain soon to be
followed by a substantive stalemate. The danger was real
that Arab extremists would obtain a veto over moderates
and the Soviet Union would achieve a veto over the posi-
tion of the extremists. All the while, Israel - maddened
by constant pressures - would withdraw into sullen
intransigence. Everything would depend on a kind of
American pressure incompatible with our domestic processes.
While the Soviet Union was gaining an increasing voice
through the frustration of all parties, Egypt -- treated
like any other participant -- would be reduced to passivity
losing control over its destiny in a welter of unpredict-
able claims.

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It was at this point that President Sadat decided to cut through the details that were getting as complicated as they were irrelevant and go to the heart of the problem: the psychological gulf that had separated Israelis and Arabs since the creation of the Jewish state. On the one hand the Jewish people persecuted and isolated for centuries found itself again condemned to a ghetto existence even when against all odds it built its own state. On the other hand, the Arabs, their pride stung by the creation of Israel and convinced that Israel was occupying their national territories, refused to accept the very existence of the Jewish state. This created a vicious circle: Israel saw security in geographic terms while the Arabs demanded geographic concessions as the price of a legitimacy so esoteric as to be almost meaningless. Intermediaries could help only up to a certain point. They could lay a foundation

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but they always left open the question whether their account
of the views of the parties reflected reality, gullibility
or their preferences. The mere fact that an intermediary
was necessary indicated the depth of the distrust and
non-acceptance.

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President Sadat cut through the suspicions of a generation
in his bold move. Israelis could judge for themselves
the nature of his commitment to peace; he could see for
himself the concerns of a people that had never known a day
of peace in its life. Sadat was right in stressing that
the heart of the problem was psychological. In dealing with
the essence of issues instead of their manifestations, Sadat
did more for their solution than all the wars and negotiations
of the previous decades.

Matters in the Middle East now can be reduced to a
few fundamentals:

There is no alternative to the Sadat-Begin negotiations.

Geneva as a negotiating forum is dead and this is just
as well. It could only lead to deadlock, imposition and
the growth of Soviet influence. If Sadat and Begin cannot
settle their disputes in the new conditions created by the
Sadat initiative diplomats meeting in an atmosphere of
failure will not solve the issue. Failure would therefore