The 1979 peace treaty between Egypt and Israel contains a provision that reads like a footnote. Article VIII of Annex I, the protocol governing withdrawal and security, requires each party to preserve the other’s war memorials and allow access: Israeli memorials in Sinai, Egyptian memorials in Israel.
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.
Begin and Sadat understood that ending a state of war was not building peace. The deepest Camp David divide was Palestinian self determination: Sadat demanded it, including statehood; the accords offered autonomy, not a state. That question remained unresolved.
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.
I grew up looking across the Dead Sea at Jordanian lights, wondering about 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.
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.
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.