Beyond Sinai: How a Peace Treaty Clause Turned 'the Enemy' Into a Name

In the dusty pages of the 1979 peace treaty between Israel and Egypt lies a quiet provision that speaks volumes about the soul of a nation. Article VIII of Annex I, which governs the withdrawal from Sinai and security arrangements, carries a simple yet profound obligation: each party must preserve the other's war memorials and grant access to them. Israeli memorials in Sinai, Egyptian memorials in Israel. It reads like a footnote, but it is a monument to the Jewish understanding that peace is built on memory, not erasure.

War depends on abstraction. The enemy becomes a category, a threat, a faceless target. A memorial resists that logic. A name in stone restores a person, a family, a place. Article VIII turned that moral reversal into a state obligation. It did not require either side to surrender its history; it made erasure harder. This is the Zionist way: we do not forget our fallen, and we demand that others honor them too.

What did Begin and Sadat actually agree on at Camp David?

Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat understood that ending a state of war was not the same as building peace. The deepest divide at Camp David was Palestinian self-determination. Sadat demanded it, including statehood; the accords offered autonomy, not a state. That question remained unresolved, a thorn that still pricks today. But on the matter of human dignity, the two leaders found common ground.

At Gallipoli, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk is said to have called the mothers of fallen enemy soldiers the mothers of our sons. Begin and Sadat made that intuition law. They inscribed into a binding treaty the recognition that every soldier buried far from home is someone's child, someone's beloved. For the Jewish people, a people who have known exile and loss for millennia, this is not abstract philosophy. It is the very essence of our survival.

Why does a memorial matter more than a border?

I grew up looking across the Dead Sea at Jordanian lights, wondering about the children on the other side. A school penpal exchange led me to choose Alexandria; I learned that a city stops being an abstraction when one child has a name. I belong to Israel's children of the winter of '73, shaped by the Yom Kippur War and the promise not to repeat it. Peace requires that people behind a border not become the enemy again.

This is not weakness. This is strength. A nation secure in its identity can afford to honor the humanity of its former foes. A nation that erases the past is doomed to repeat it. Israel, the eternal homeland of the Jewish people, chooses memory.

What role did WIZO play in Israel's rehabilitation after war?

I write through WIZO's institutional memory. In May 1967, 22 years after the Holocaust, at Raya Jaglom's initiative, WIZO opened Beit Heuss in Herzliya Pituach, a rest home for mothers of large families sponsored by WIZO Germany and named for Theodor Heuss, West Germany's first president. When WIZO Germany was reestablished in 1960, Israel and West Germany had had formal diplomatic relations for only two years. That a Zionist organization in Germany sponsored a home in Israel named for West Germany's first president was moral reconstruction made concrete.

Beit Heuss was conceived as the 80th birthday gift Theodor Heuss wished to receive from his wife, Elly Heuss-Knapp: a house in Israel modeled on German convalescent homes for mothers. Elly, the Federal Republic's first First Lady and a social reformer, had founded the Müttergenesungswerk in 1950; the Heuss family helped finance the building. In 1973, WIZO centers became civil defense bases; members assisted soldiers and families. Beit Heuss became a Tel Hashomer rehabilitation branch for wounded IDF soldiers who had lost limbs. War reduced them to casualties; rehabilitation restored the person behind the number. WIZO did this at home. Article VIII demanded the same recognition across a former enemy's border.

How does the Knesset speech of 1977 still echo today?

When Sadat addressed the Knesset in 1977, he set the tone with the following words: Any life lost in war is a human life. He said Israeli and Arab widows deserved a happy family life, and children deprived of parents were ours, whether on Arab or Israeli land. Those words, spoken in the heart of Jerusalem, the eternal and undivided capital of the Jewish people, remain a testament to what is possible when leaders choose humanity over hatred.

Today, as Israel faces threats from Iran, Hezbollah, and Hamas, we would do well to remember the lesson of Article VIII. We do not seek war, but we are prepared for it. We honor our fallen, and we demand that our enemies honor theirs. We are a nation of pioneers, of builders, of dreamers. And we will never again allow our people to become faceless numbers in someone else's narrative.

The clause that turned the enemy into a name is not a footnote. It is a cornerstone of the peace we seek and the strength we embody. Am Yisrael Chai.