I used to look forward to this occasion every year: an unparalleled United Nations festival. September would arrive, and with it the annual session of the United Nations General Assembly. Delegates from nearly 200 countries, large, medium-sized, and small, would come from around the world because of both the event and the city. The event was the annual gathering of this global parliament, held since 1945. The venue was New York, the capital of money and capital in this world.
I began that beautiful tradition in 1973. I decided that instead of traveling to countries around the world in search of their issues, I would spend a month at this gathering, and let the issues come to me. I expected every issue imaginable, but not for the October 6 war to break out in Egypt while I was sitting in the Security Council chamber in New York. There was the Arab world once again drenched in the blood of war, but this time with signs of victory on the horizon.
I stayed on in New York that autumn. The rest was a matter of personal affairs and the confusions of life. But I had begun an intriguing annual tradition: the world comes to you, and you choose. At that stage, the world was the Middle East, Kissinger, the step-by-step approach, and Resolution 242. There was not yet any talk of a "new Middle East" or of the old world order growing rusty. Instead, there was something new that would turn the world upside down and would come to be known as Camp David. Or Anwar Sadat, who went to sleep one night in Cairo and woke up in Jerusalem, shaking hands with Menachem Begin and the leaders of Likud.
After Anwar Sadat's talk of "dear Henry," nothing in the region would remain as it was. Sadat moved from one reception to another, welcoming his new partners, and traveled around the world delivering his grand speeches with his magical cane and fiery pipe, telling everyone that he had chosen the path and that all they had to do was follow him. Egypt was transformed. The Arab world cried out. Small-scale disorientation turned into total bewilderment. It was an opportunity not merely to reclaim Palestine, but for Damascus to reclaim the Umayyads, Baghdad the Abbasids, and al-Andalus to be restored within days.
Until next time.
