Egypt—Israel’s Strange, Warlike “Peace” Partner A government press that calls for Israel’s demise. P.David Hornik
https://pdavidhornik.substack.com/
“The Al-Aqsa Flood [the October 7 massacre] caused an earthquake whose repercussions are still rocking the very foundations of the loathsome occupation state. Despite the piercing pain we feel over the victims of the Gaza war, [which is a war of] collective extermination, I am convinced that the Al-Aqsa Flood will be the most important and influential juncture in the history of the Palestinian struggle…. The Palestinian resistance has proved that the spirit of the struggle has not died, that the dream of national liberation has not dissipated and that the dream of an independent Palestinian state is close [to being realized]. As for the Zionist occupation state, its fate is to disintegrate and cease to exist.”
This is not the latest piece of Iranian or Hamas propaganda; it’s from a column by Atef Zaidan that appeared on June 22 in Akhbar al-Yawm, an Egyptian weekly government paper. As MEMRI, the Jerusalem-based Middle East Media Research Institute, notes:
Articles published in the Egyptian government press in the last few weeks praise Hamas’ conduct in the Gaza war and predict the demise of Israel and of the U.S. as a world power. Titled “The End of Israel,” “Israel Has No Future,” “Israel Self-Destructs,” “A World Without America,” and more, the articles describe Hamas’ fighters as “brave” and as “heroes….” Meanwhile, IDF soldiers are described as helpless cowards who are “weaker than a spider’s web.” They describe Israel as a constant threat to the Arabs that must perish if the Arabs are to survive, and predict that its end is indeed near…. [T]he position expressed in these articles—praise for Hamas and justification of its October 7, 2023 attack, alongside gloating over Israel’s woes—has been taken by the Egyptian government press since the attack itself and the outbreak of the Gaza war.
Egypt, it should be noted, signed a US-sponsored peace treaty with Israel in 1979. Israel, for its part, gave back all of the Sinai Peninsula, which Israel had conquered in the 1967 Six-Day War to preempt an invasion by Egypt. The treaty states that “Each Party undertakes to ensure that acts or threats of belligerency, hostility, or violence do not originate from and are not committed from within its territory…. Each Party also undertakes to refrain from organizing, instigating, inciting, assisting or participating in acts or threats of belligerency, hostility, subversion or violence against the other Party, anywhere, and undertakes to ensure that perpetrators of such acts are brought to justice.”
Neither the spirit nor the letter of that clause was upheld on June 24 by columnist Farouk Gouida in Al-Ahram, an Egyptian-government daily, where he wrote:
The resistance has managed to rock Israel to the core, despite the American support. This war may be the beginning of the end [of Israel], especially since the Palestinian people, as well as the Arab street, support Hamas, the only force that has managed to put the Palestinian cause back on the right track. The story is not yet complete, since the future will be even worse [for Israel].
Beyond verbal incitement, Egypt also appears to have been derelict in “refrain[ing] from…assisting…in acts or threats of belligerency, hostility, subversion or violence against the other Party.”
As David Schenker of the Washington Institute for Near Policy noted on May 28:
After entering Rafah [on the Gaza–Sinai border] earlier [that] month…Israeli forces announced the discovery of at least fifty tunnels crossing into Egypt. No doubt, this disclosure is a source of embarrassment to Cairo. For many observers, these tunnels confirm Egypt’s complicity—whether through bribery or negligence—in the smuggling of weapons that enabled Hamas to carry out the October 7 attack.
True, in 2015 “Egyptian forces famously flooded several tunnels…to stem the prodigious flow of weapons between Sinai insurgents and Hamas.” Egypt was concerned, though, about arms traffic in the other direction—from Hamas to the Islamist insurgents in the Sinai. That insurgency has largely been suppressed—with Israel’s help. Egypt, though, appears to have—at best—been much less concerned about stopping the flow of Iranian arms in the Sinai-to-Gaza direction.
In the view of Eli Dekel, an Israeli retired senior intelligence officer, it’s a lot worse than that. Dekel, while warning of an Egyptian military buildup in Sinai since 2004, claims it’s gotten a lot worse since 2014—ironically, in the aftermath of the purportedly moderate Sisi government’s overthrow of the Muslim Brotherhood regime. Dekel, accordingly, highlights Egypt’s “buildup of its forces and…intensive construction of military infrastructure, especially in Sinai and on both fronts of the [Suez] Canal.”
Dekel, at least for now, is a maverick in the world of current and former Israeli security officials. He says that the ”troubling phenomena” he points to “do not worry the public in Israel, including the senior military veterans I spoke with in academic research institutes, commentators and journalists, including military affairs journalists who are fed by the Israeli security system with the concept that, after Egypt received the last inch of the land of Sinai from Israel, it has no interest in harming Israel.”
The mainstream view, Dekel reports, is that Egypt’s buildup stems from factors like its fear of Ethiopia’s threat to steal Nile River water; its fear of a threat posed by one of the factions in Libya’s civil conflict; and its aspiration to be the leading, and most powerful, African and Arab country—not from aggressive designs against Israel.
It can be hoped that the mainstream is right and Egypt—which gets $1.3 billion in annual military aid from the US—is still geopolitically one of the moderate, Western-aligned Arab countries and, especially with its severe economic problems, is not angling for war with Israel. What is clear, though, is that peace treaties between Israel and Arab actors tend to be fragile phenomena that are often honored in the breach by those actors and do not bear out the celebratory atmosphere that accompanies their signing.
That is particularly true, in multiple ways, of the Israeli–Palestinian peace accords of the 1990s, the aftermath of which does not justify the ongoing blind, robotic US and European pressures for the “two-state solution” that the majority of Israelis now see as a hollow and dangerous formula.
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