Egypt no precedent for 'peace'

That’s what it says in the Peace Treaty between Israel and Egypt that was signed on March 26, 1979. Cut to 2006, and the Sinai - which reverted to Egyptian sovereignty thanks to that treaty - is a terror enclave with al-Qaeda holed up in the mountains, and a source of nonstop smuggling of weapons (along with terrorists) into Gaza from high-grade explosives to rifles to antitank and anti-aircraft missiles.

And the arms smuggling from Sinai has been going on since the beginning of the Oslo era, well before the peninsula was infiltrated by al-Qaeda cells that may (or may not) be outside the Mubarak regime's control. Israel’s reaction has been a constant stream of statements that Mubarak will have to “do more” - and of endless pilgrimages to Cairo (the latest by Infrastructure Minister Binyamin Ben Eliezer) to try to talk him into that.

It’s always, of course, Israeli leaders going to Cairo; except for showing up for Yitzhak Rabin’s funeral, Mubarak has never set foot in Israel in this entire period of “peace.”

The Israeli-Egyptian treaty also states that: “The Parties shall seek to foster mutual understanding and tolerance and will, accordingly, abstain from hostile propaganda against each other.” Cut to 2006, and Egypt ’s media, schools, and mosques are busily instilling hatred of Israel and Jews - and have been, again, throughout this entire “peace” era.

Many Israelis and Diaspora Jews, however, are impressed by Israeli-Egyptian “peace” - to the point that they see it as an encouraging precedent for further Israeli giveaways. The enthusiasts range from Defense Minister Amir Peretz, who wants to “explore” the idea of ceding the whole Golan to Syria, to American Jewish peace groups like the Israel Policy Forum, American Friends of Peace Now, and Brit Tzedek v’Shalom that see pressuring the US administration to press Israel to hand the West Bank to the Palestinians as the best way to bring Shangri-La to our troubled region.

Egypt rebuilds army

These enthusiasts emphasize the point that since the Israeli-Egyptian treaty there have been no Israeli-Egyptian wars. They ignore the fact that there probably wouldn’t have been any anyway.

By 1978, when the Israeli-Egyptian negotiations began, Egypt had been defeated resoundingly by Israel in four wars and was discouraged and deterred. Since Israel’s retreat from Sinai, Egypt has received a steady flow of state-of-the-art US weaponry while rebuilding a massive army whose training exercises focus on Israel as the enemy.

Even if we can’t say for sure what would have happened without the treaty, we can say for sure that 27 years later Israeli forces are engaged in daily warfare to stop smuggling from Sinai, Egypt remains steeped in Jew-hatred, and that the combination of animosity and military buildup is - rationally speaking - much more worrisome than encouraging.

(The Israeli and Jewish peaceniks also cite Israel’s 1994 treaty with Jordan - a formality that ratified an already-existing de facto peace between governments and did not involve significant land concessions.)

Those who keep praising Israeli-Egyptian “peace” as a precedent, then, are saying something (assuming they’re not just ignorant) about themselves: namely, that they have no standards. The fact that Egypt keeps blatantly violating the most crucial clauses of the treaty does not matter to them.

The spectacle of an anti-Semitic society does not trouble them as long as at the present moment it is not firing its own guns at Israel . The daily use of weapons smuggled from Sinai in attacks on Israeli civilians does not dampen their wish to see the far more strategically and tactically sensitive Golan and West Bank in Arab hands.

Dignity and pride also don’t rate too high for the peaceniks. The fact that the traffic of diplomats (and tourists) between Israel and Egypt is heavily lopsided doesn’t signal to them that something is wrong here - it probably just means to them that Israel hasn’t yet prostrated itself enough.

In these days of grave external threats to Israel there is also, as always, an ongoing need for vigilance against dangerously naïve or irresponsible elements from within.

P. David Hornik is a freelance writer and translator living in Tel Aviv and a columnist for FrontPageMagazine.com