It’s November 19, 1977. Anwar Sadat is on a plane to Tel Aviv. He’s the president of Egypt. No Arab leader has ever set foot in Israel. His own foreign minister resigned rather than make this trip. Syria, Iraq, Libya, and the PLO have all condemned him. The Arab League is preparing to expel Egypt — the largest, most powerful Arab nation. The man flying the plane is entering enemy airspace with the full knowledge that the landing might end his political career, his alliances, and possibly his life.
He lands. He descends the stairs. Golda Meir is waiting. Moshe Dayan. Yitzhak Rabin. Ariel Sharon, who four years earlier had led the tank assault across the Suez Canal against Egyptian forces. Sadat shakes each hand. He smiles. He walks into the Knesset and delivers a speech in Arabic — deliberately in Arabic — to a chamber of Israeli lawmakers who have never heard an Arab head of state address them as anything other than an enemy.
“I have come to you today on solid ground to shape a new life and to establish peace,” he says. The room is silent. The translation barely keeps up. Outside, the Arab world is burning his effigy.
What He Knew
He knew the trip would cost him allies. He knew it might cost him Egypt’s seat at the table of Arab solidarity. He knew the math: Israel had nuclear weapons and American backing, and four wars in thirty years had achieved nothing except casualties and territory lost. He’d launched the October War in 1973 — the surprise assault across the Suez Canal that restored Egyptian military pride and gave him the standing to negotiate from strength rather than weakness. The war was the precondition for the peace. He understood that paradox completely.
He also knew something his critics didn’t: the Egyptian economy was collapsing. The cost of permanent military readiness against Israel was consuming the budget. The people needed bread, not bullets. Sadat had been to the front lines. He’d watched men die. And he’d concluded that continuing to watch men die over the Sinai Peninsula was a form of leadership he was no longer willing to practice.
What He Didn’t Know
He didn’t know that the Camp David Accords would take another year of agonizing negotiation — thirteen days at Camp David in September 1978, with Jimmy Carter physically walking between his cabin and Begin’s because the two men could barely stand to be in the same room. He didn’t know that the Nobel Peace Prize would come with a target on his back. He didn’t know that on October 6, 1981, at a military parade commemorating his own war, soldiers from within his own army would open fire on the reviewing stand.
He was sitting in the front row. He didn’t duck. Witnesses said he stood up as the bullets hit him. Whether this was reflex or defiance, nobody knows. He died the way he’d governed — in the open, refusing to take cover.
What He’d Tell You About It Now
Sadat would tell you the decision was simple. Not easy — simple. He’d use that distinction the way a surgeon uses a scalpel. “The choice was between two futures,” he’d say. “One had peace and the Sinai returned. The other had war and the Sinai lost. I chose the future with the Sinai.”
He’d tell you the loneliest moment wasn’t the flight. It was the morning after he announced the trip, when his own cabinet sat in silence and he could see on their faces that they thought he’d lost his mind. He’d tell you that courage and isolation are the same thing, experienced from different angles.
He wouldn’t claim to be a saint. He’d jailed thousands of political opponents in September 1981, a month before his assassination. The crackdown was broad, indiscriminate, the act of a man who knew he’d spent his political capital and was trying to hold the country together by force. The same decisiveness that flew him to Jerusalem also signed those arrest warrants.
“You want to know what I’d change?” he’d say. “Nothing about the peace. Everything about the month before I died.”
He flew to Jerusalem alone. He came back with peace, a Nobel Prize, and the knowledge that it would probably kill him. Talk to Anwar Sadat.