The Cold Peace; The 1979 Egyptian-Israeli treaty endures, 25 years after Sadat. But can it last much longer?

Byline: Christopher Dickey and Zvika Krieger

The anniversary went almost unnoticed. There were no major commemorative events. Only a few perfunctory articles appeared in the Egyptian, Israeli and American press. A quarter century after the assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat on Oct. 6, 1981, the shooting spree that took his life during a military parade has come to seem just another blood-soaked footnote in the long chronicle of Middle East violence and despair.

Yet we know now that it showed the shape of things to come. The shooters were caught and executed. But several of the Egyptian Islamists rounded up in connection with the murder, including Dr. Ayman Al-Zawahiri, would go on to become core figures in Al Qaeda. And radicals on all sides discovered the power to disrupt plans for peace with a single spectacular act of terror. (The murder of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin at the hands of a Jewish extremist would come in 1995.) Today, almost three decades after President Jimmy Carter negotiated the Camp David accords and the final treaty signed by Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin in 1979, the peace that remains is at best called "cold"--and could be in serious trouble.

Ordinary Egyptians and Israelis, most of whom never knew firsthand the horrific wars between Cairo and Tel Aviv, find Sadat's legacy a source not of hope but of anger. For Egypt's Hosni Mubarak, president for this last quarter century, peace has become synonymous with political stability and a status quo represented by ... himself. In effect, Sadat's heir tells those Egyptians who challenge him--and Americans who criticize him--"Choose: peace or democracy; you can't have both." It's a dangerous game of mixed signals, and it began almost as soon as Sadat died.

Fabrice Moussus, a French cameraman working for ABC television, remembers that day. "The atmosphere was very tense," says Moussus. Sadat had cultivated Egypt's Islamists, but when they turned on his treaty, he turned on them with a brutal crackdown. Now they were taking their revenge. Moussus heard the crackle of gunfire and turned his lens on the action as the killers threw grenades and sprayed the stands with bullets. Dignitaries were dismembered; some were dying. "People were moaning," remembers Moussus, "like the wounded on a battlefield." Hosni Mubarak, then vice president, had been sitting on one side of Sadat in a fresh, colorful uniform made just for the occasion. He was unscathed. Sadat, carried away by the bodyguards who failed to shield him, was nowhere to be seen.

Sadat had been bold. He waged a surprise war against Israel in 1973 and opened the way for a surprise peace with his trip to Jerusalem in 1977. From that, it would seem, Mubarak learned what not to do. He has been much more tentative than Sadat, at times almost duplicitous. Yet the 1979 Egyptian-Israeli treaty has held up. That's the good news. The bad: that its credibility with the public, never high, is eroding dramatically. "From the beginning, the people were not involved," says Egyptian activist and former parliamentarian Mona Makram Ebeid. "People were happy that the war was over, but they did not know what peace was supposed to be." Mubarak has never done much to teach them. To this day, his only visit to Israel was for the funeral of Yitzhak Rabin.

Serious strains began to show six years ago, with the second Palestinian intifada. Mubarak opted for a sort of double strategy that saw him offering his services on the world stage to try to calm the conflict, even as Egyptian state radio played martial airs and state-controlled media railed against the Zionists. "The relationship between Israel and Egypt was at its lowest level ever," recalls Shalom Cohen, Israel's veteran ambassador to Egypt. "It was basically frozen." Yet today? Despite the brutal Lebanon war last summer, which further heightened popular hatred of Israel among Egyptians and other Arabs, Israeli historian Michael B. Oren describes the relationship with Cairo as "better than at any time since 1981."