Washington’s $2 billion in annual aid to Egypt will be cut off if Cairo backs out of the peace treaty with Israel, Congresswoman Kay Granger – whose job as chairwoman of the US House appropriations foreign operations subcommittee means she literally writes America’s annual foreign aid bill – told
The Jerusalem Post on Monday.
“The United States aid to Egypt is predicated on the peace treaty between Egypt and Israel, and so the relationship between Egypt and Israel is extremely important,” the eight-term Republican from Texas said in an interview.
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Granger, here among a delegation of 25 Republican congressmen sponsored by the American Israel Educational Foundation, a charitable organization affiliated with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, said she is on record as saying that “if the treaty between Egypt and Israel is not continued, our financial support will not continue.”
She said she was not aware of any US threat to cut aid to Egypt during
discussions this week on defusing the Israeli-Egyptian crisis following
Thursday’s terrorist attack and the ensuing killing of three Egyptian
security officials. A senior Israeli official said that not only was
there no threat of a cutoff of aid, but that there was no need for such a
threat, and Israel never asked for one.
While Egypt and Israel were in direct contact in defusing the crisis,
the US was also heavily involved in the discussions as well.
Regarding how the Muslim Brotherhood’s participation in a future
Egyptian government would impact the level of aid, Granger said this
would depend “on how much of a position they have.”
Everyone, she said, assumed the Muslim Brotherhood would have some role
and some participation in the next Egyptian government, but what will
impact the level of US assistance will be the level of its governmental
control.
She said all of this has been made clear to the Egyptians, and that at a
meeting in March with transition head Field Marshal Muhammad Hussein
Tantawi, the first thing she asked was whether the treaty with Israel
would be honored.
“The answer was yes,” she said.
The tension with Egypt was raised during a meeting the Congressional
delegation had with Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, but she said he
did not raise the aid issue.
Another official said that at the meeting Netanyahu said only the
international community should “support the countries that keep the
peace.”
Since the 1979 peace treaty with Egypt, the US has provided Cairo with
$2b. of aid annually, $1.3b. in military assistance and the rest in
economic assistance.
Granger, who along with the delegation is scheduled to meet Palestinian
Authority President Mahmoud Abbas on Wednesday, said it has been made
clear that if the PA goes through with its statehood recognition bid at
the UN in September, the roughly $500m. of US aid to the PA would be
suspended. She said this would include money for Palestinian security
training.
Granger said the message the delegation would bring to Abbas was that
there was a strong “bipartisan desire” in the US Congress to see a
return to peace negotiations “in a very serious way.”