Anwar Sadat

Anwar Sadat: The Peace That Killed Him

Twice, 6 October made Anwar Sadat. In 1973 it was the day his army crossed the Suez Canal and shattered the myth of Israeli invincibility, earning him the title Hero of the Crossing. In 1981 it was the anniversary parade at which Lieutenant Khalid Al-Islambuli stepped out of a truck and shot him dead. Between those two dates he had done the thing no Arab leader had done: flown to Jerusalem, addressed the Knesset, and signed a peace with Israel that made him a Nobel laureate abroad and a traitor at home.

Fourteen Siblings and a Prison Cell

He was born on 25 December 1918 in the Monufia governorate of the Nile Delta, one of fourteen children in a family of modest means; his father came from Upper Egypt, his mother was of Egyptian and Sudanese descent. He graduated from the Royal Military Academy in Cairo in 1938 — the same year as Gamal Abdel Nasser — and was posted to the Signal Corps.

His early politics were the politics of anti-colonial desperation. A member of the Young Egypt Party, Sadat collaborated with Nazi Germany during the Second World War on the reasoning that Britain's enemy was Egypt's friend. It cost him: failed conspiracies, arrest, and years in prison. He came out with a conspirator's patience and a taste for the dramatic gesture that never left him.

In Nasser's Shadow

Sadat met Nasser in Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, and the two co-founded the Free Officers movement against British rule and royal corruption. When the coup came in July 1952, it was Sadat who gave the first statement of the revolution over the radio, announcing to Egypt that King Farouk was finished.

For eighteen years afterwards he was the loyal second-rank man: minister of state in 1954, speaker of the National Assembly from 1960 to 1968, vice-president in 1964 and again from 1969. Cairo's political class read him as a placeholder — pliable, unthreatening, an interim figure who would be managed by the Nasserists around him. When Nasser died in September 1970 and Sadat succeeded him in October, almost nobody expected him to last.

The Corrective Revolution

He lasted by moving first. The 1971 Corrective Revolution purged the Nasserist power centres from the government and the security apparatus, and simultaneously released the Islamists Nasser had jailed — a calculated trade of cultural and ideological latitude for political support against the left. It worked, and it planted the charge that would eventually kill him.

In 1972 he expelled the Soviet military advisers who had run Egypt's armed forces since Suez, a step read in Washington and Moscow as strategic suicide. It was in fact preparation. Sadat reformed the army, kept his intentions to himself, and waited.

The Crossing

On 6 October 1973 Egyptian forces crossed the canal into Sinai on the Jewish Day of Atonement, achieving complete tactical surprise. Israel recovered and counterattacked with force, and the war ended without Sinai returned. That was not really the point. As the University of Maryland's Sadat Chair records, he emerged from the conflict with enormous prestige: the Arab world had been given a victory it could believe in, and Sadat had acquired the one thing he needed to make peace — the standing of a man who was not suing from weakness.

Infitah and Bread

At home he dismantled Nasser's command economy. The Infitah, or "opening," liberalised trade and investment and courted foreign capital, reorienting Egypt from Moscow toward Washington. The cost landed on the poor. When price controls were lifted in January 1977, bread riots broke out across Egypt and the policy had to be partly reversed. The episode exposed the structural problem of his presidency: his boldest moves were made over the heads of the people they most affected.

Jerusalem

In November 1977 Sadat did the unimaginable. He flew to Israel — the first Arab leader ever to set foot there officially — met Prime Minister Menachem Begin, and stood at the podium of the Knesset to put a peace settlement directly to the Israeli parliament. The Arab world and the Soviet Union were united in opposition; he went anyway. Asked once what he wanted, he answered: "One, peace in the Middle East. Two, peace in the Middle East. Three, peace in the Middle East."

Jimmy Carter took the opening and turned it into process. The Camp David Accords followed in 1978, and on 26 March 1979 Egypt and Israel signed the first peace treaty between Israel and an Arab state. Sadat and Begin shared the 1978 Nobel Peace Prize for creating it.

The bill arrived immediately. The Arab League suspended Egypt from 1979 to 1989, denouncing a separate peace that abandoned the Palestinians. At home, Islamists and leftists converged in opposition. By September 1981 Sadat was arresting more than 1,500 people — opposition politicians, Coptic clergy, Islamic Jihad members — in a sweep that missed the one cell that mattered.

Why Anwar Is Called a Genius

His claim rests on a single faculty, exercised at the highest possible stakes: strategic sequencing. Sadat understood something almost nobody around him did — that a negotiation cannot be opened from a position of humiliation, and that the way to make peace with Israel was first to fight it credibly. Expelling the Soviet advisers in 1972, rebuilding the army, and crossing the canal in 1973 were not separate policies but a single move whose payoff was the Jerusalem flight of 1977. He spent four years and a war buying the political capital to do the thing he actually wanted, and then he spent all of it at once.

The Knesset visit itself was an act of pure theatrical imagination. No treaty, no protocol, no intermediary could have done what a single televised arrival did to the psychology of both nations. He calculated correctly that the gesture would be irreversible, and it was: the treaty has held for over four decades.

The honest counter-case is that this was tactical brilliance rather than intellectual depth, and that it came bundled with serious misjudgements. He released the Islamists in 1971 for short-term advantage and they killed him a decade later. The Infitah enriched a narrow class and produced the 1977 bread riots. Above all he made his peace alone, isolating Egypt from the Arab world for ten years and leaving the Palestinian question unresolved, which is precisely why critics regard the opposition he faced as legitimate rather than fanatical. He was not a thinker. He was a gambler with an exceptional sense of timing, and one of his bets came due on a reviewing stand.

Legacy

Al-Islambuli's gunmen killed eleven others in the parade attack, among them an Omani general and the Cuban ambassador; the plot had been organised by Muhammad Abd al-Salam Faraj of Egyptian Islamic Jihad under a fatwa from Omar Abdel-Rahman. Five men were executed in April 1982 and around 300 radicals stood trial. Hosni Mubarak succeeded him and ruled for thirty years.

His funeral drew a record foreign turnout, including three former American presidents — and a conspicuously thin Arab delegation, the two facts that together define him. He received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1984 and a posthumous Congressional Gold Medal in 2018, and left behind an autobiography, *In Search of Identity*. Egypt and Israel have not fought a war since.

Achievements

• President of Egypt (1970–1981)
• Prime Minister of Egypt (1980–1981)
• Vice President of Egypt (1969–1970)
• Prime Minister of Egypt (1973–1974)
• Nobel Peace Prize — 1978
• Collar of the Order of Isabella the Catholic‎ — 1977
• Presidential Medal of Freedom — 1984
• Order of Ojaswi Rajanya
• Educated at Egyptian Military College