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Sadat and Begin - The Peacemakers

(Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies-Bar-Ilan University) Dr. Martin Kramer - Anwar Sadat came from a poor village in the Nile Delta. Menachem Begin came from the crumbling world of East European Jewry, later erased from the earth. Sadat was an Axis sympathizer during WWII. Begin's parents and brother were murdered by the Nazis. Sadat was an authoritarian dictator who sent his opponents to prison. Begin was a classic liberal with a firm commitment to democracy and the rule of law. But the similarities between the two are just as striking. Here were two men forged by prison and violence into believers in their own destiny, but who had been written off politically for decades. Here were two men possessed not only by a strong sense of peoplehood, but of its geography, which they conceived in ways that left no overlapping territorial claims. The writer is founding president emeritus of Shalem College in Jerusalem.
2017-11-20 00:00:00
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