Lessons of Sadat's assassination - editorial

• Published date: 06 October 2021
• Author: JPOST EDITORIAL
• Publication title: Jerusalem Post, The: Web Edition Articles (Israel)

Despite Israel quickly regaining its footing and position three weeks later within striking distance of both Cairo and Damascus, that war punctured the country's aura of invincibility.

The country suddenly viewed itself, and was viewed by its enemies, as vulnerable, a perception that shaped both Israel's policies and the policies of others toward it for years to come.

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But October 6 is not only the anniversary of the Yom Kippur War. On that same day eight years later – in fact, at a military parade in Cairo commemorating what is still viewed in Egypt as a great victory – Islamic radicals gunned down Egyptian president Anwar Sadat.

That event, too, was an earthquake whose aftershocks are still rattling the region, but one that is often viewed through too narrow a lens, as "merely" a reflection of hatred toward Israel and fierce opposition to Sadat's signing a peace treaty with Israel in 1979.

Sadat's assassination certainly did reflect those two fiercely anti-Israel sentiments, but there was more to it than that. His assassination was also a natural extension of what erupted in Iran two years earlier, when Ayatollah Khomeini deposed the shah and ushered in the Islamic Republic; of the seizure of the Grand Mosque in Mecca by Islamic radicals that same year, which led to the deaths of hundreds; and of the process of Islamization that was altering Pakistan.

The Sadat assassination was obviously about Israel, but not only about Israel. It was also a graphic manifestation of this radical, violent Islam that fundamentally rejected the West. It was a portent of much worse things to come.

As the journalist Kim Ghattas wrote in her 2020 book, Black Wave, chronicling the "rivalry that unraveled the Middle East" between Iran and Saudi Arabia, at the time of Sadat's assassination there were those in Egypt who were "in awe of the Iranian revolution, mesmerized by the masses on the street and the sight of people power at work, bringing down a tyrant, a traitor to.... [their] people and to Palestine."

In other words, what happened in Iran did not stay in Iran. The 1979 Iranian revolution unleashed a radicalization of Islam and provided a strong tailwind to the...