Former Military Intelligence chief Amos Yadlin said Wednesday that Egypt’s
deployment of tanks to Sinai should not be a worry for Israel so long as Egypt
cracks down on terrorist groups operating in the peninsula.
“Terrorism is
fought with tanks,” Yadlin, currently head of Tel Aviv University’s Institute
for National Security Studies, told Army Radio during an
interview.
Yadlin argued that if the Egyptian operation in Sinai proves
to be a wide-ranging counter-terrorism maneuver, Israel would need to adopt a
realistic view of the presence of Egyptian forces.
Israel has already
given Egypt approval to insert more military forces than the quantity specified
by the 1979 Camp David peace treaty, Yadlin added.
In an apparent
response to comments Tuesday by Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman, who said
Israel must ensure that every letter of the peace treaty is enforced, Yadlin
said there is no need to latch on to every letter of the agreement.
“What
the Egyptians are doing in Sinai today is a more significant effort than in the
past to deal with terrorism,” Yadlin said. “So long as the operation is
widespread and focused against terrorism, I think we need to look at this
realistically.”
Earlier this month, an Israeli source told The Jerusalem
Post he was confident that American leverage over Egypt, in the form of a $1.3
billion annual military aid package, would be sufficient to ensure that Egypt
sticks to the peace treaty.
The source, who spoke soon after President
Mohamed Morsy ousted military chiefs and the defense minister and replaced them
with new appointments, said that the Egyptian military will continue to rely on
US aid.