Cover story in Issue 24, March 16, 2009 of The Jerusalem Report. To subscribe to The Jerusalem Report click here.

The White House handshake March 26, 1979
Photo: GPO , JRep

Just before its 30th anniversary, the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty survived one of its sternest tests. Despite angry region-wide protests against Israel over the 22-day December-January war in Gaza, the Egyptian government did not issue any harsh condemnations or convene the Arab League to call for sanctions against Israel or its Western backers.

Nor, even more significantly, did it mobilize Egyptian armed forces or make any threat of military intervention. All this was taken for granted even though the war raged on territory once controlled by Egypt, was fought perilously close to the Egyptian border and some Egyptian border guards were accidentally killed.

On the Egyptian street and in the media, the reaction was very different. The buzzword in Cairo was and still is "the genocide" committed by Israel against Palestinian civilians in Gaza. Nevertheless, the Egyptian government was far more critical of the Iranian-backed Hamas than it was of Israel. There was particular anger at the fact that Hamas, who are Sunni Muslims like the Egyptians, had allied themselves with Shi'ite Iran, which the Egyptian government sees as its most dangerous regional foe.

Indeed, on the strategic level, in the fight against Hamas, Egypt and Israel found themselves on the same side. The shakeup of the Middle Eastern strategic architecture, largely set in motion by the Israel-Egypt peace deal, has created a state of affairs in which, in a showdown against an Arab force, Israel is not necessarily isolated in the Arab world.

That was certainly not the case when Israel was founded in 1948. Then Arab rejectionism of Israel, led largely by Egypt, was monolithic. The loudly aggressive Pan-Arabism spread in the 1950s and 60s by Egypt's charismatic president Gamal Abdel Nasser was shaped around the idea of destroying Israel. In Nasser's day, Egypt sponsored Palestinian "Fedayeen" terror operations against Israel, and the Cairo-based and controlled Arab League led the economic boycott. Starting from 1948, Egypt played a leading role in five wars with Israel, the last of which, in 1973, left an indelible scar on the Israeli psyche. Complicating matters further, Egypt, until well into the 1970s, was a Soviet proxy, armed to the teeth with Soviet weaponry.

Indeed, for the first precarious 29 years of Israel's existence, Egypt was its strongest and most inveterate foe. The idea of peace with the Arabs, especially Egypt, seemed hopelessly inaccessible.

So when the late Egyptian president Anwar Sadat made his historic visit to Jerusalem in November 1977, Israelis were euphoric. The image of a smiling Sadat emerging from the plane that brought him remains etched in the collective memory as a transcendent moment that defied belief. Israelis hoped it would lead to warm relations between the peoples, heavy two-way tourist traffic, and, even more importantly, peace between Israel and the entire Arab world.

After the September 1978 Camp David Accords, setting out the parameters for an Israel-Egypt accommodation, this heady optimism was reinforced by another iconic image: 30 years ago, on March 26, 1979, Sadat, Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin and U.S. president Jimmy Carter standing up after signing the peace deal on the White House lawn, and all three clasping hands in a gesture of single-minded purpose.

The thinking was that once Egypt made the first move, the rest of the Arab world would follow. But to date, only one other Arab country, Jordan, has made peace with Israel. And the peace with Egypt, although it has survived Sadat's assassination, two Lebanon wars, two Palestinian intifadas and the recent war in Gaza, remains distinctly frosty.

Cold or not, most Israeli experts attach incalculable strategic significance to the peace. Yet some hawks, such as Yuval Steinitz, the former Likud chairman of the Knesset's Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, highlight what they see as worrying ambivalences in Cairo's policies towards Israel. They note, for example, that Egypt has been building a huge modern westernized army at great expense; that it has done little to help spread the peace to other Arab countries; that it often moves to undermine Israel's international standing; and that it allows widespread anti-Israel and anti-Semitic incitement.

Their arguments are not without foundation. Of all the Arab armies, Egypt's is by far the strongest. During the three decades of peace, it has spent nearly $50 billion modernizing its armed forces and introducing state-of-the-art American equipment to replace obsolete Soviet stocks. It has a standing army of 450,000 compared to Israel's 175,000; it assembles its own front-line American MIA1 Abrams battle tanks, the equivalent of the Israeli Merkava; like Israel, it has a large tank force of around 4,000; like Israel, it has over 200 American-made frontline F-16 fighter planes; it has Apache attack helicopters, frigates capable of delivering satellite-guided Harpoon missiles and Scud ground-to-ground missiles.

Israeli critics of the Egyptian military buildup ask why, if it is at peace with Israel, does Egypt need such an enormous force and they point out that, despite peace, most major exercises relate to Israel as the enemy. The latest of these, in mid-February, took place in the Sinai, with large Egyptian armored and air forces driving back an invader from the east (Israel).
Egypt has also been less than forthcoming on the diplomatic front. In the mid-1990s, it tried to scuttle Israeli efforts to bring Jordan, Morocco and Qatar into the peacemaking club, and again in 2000, President Hosni Mubarak torpedoed any chance there may have been for peace with the Palestinians at that time, when he warned Yasser Arafat not to compromise over Jerusalem.

Moreover, every five years, when renewal of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty (NPT) comes up, Egypt inevitably tries to bring international pressure to bear on Israel to dismantle its presumed nuclear arsenal. And over the past several months, Israeli diplomats have been complaining that Egypt has been working behind the scenes to scuttle a planned upgrading of Israeli ties with the EU.