WATANI International
28 August 2011
Egypt and Israel have been embroiled in a diplomatic crisis since Friday 19 August over the killing of five Egyptian security personnel during an Israeli operation against cross-border raiders.
The operation came in retaliation to an assault by Palestinian militants, which killed six Israelis and wounded 25, at the beach resort of Eilat across the border with Egypt. Israel blamed the attack on Palestinians who entered from the Hamas-run Gaza Strip via Egypt’s Sinai. Israeli forces chased the infiltrators, killing seven of them, in an air strike against Gaza on Thursday, and launched more than a dozen raids on Friday. At least 15 Palestinians were killed and, in the crossfire, the five Egyptians lost their lives.
Joint investigation
Egypt’s Cabinet said an Israeli statement expressing regret for the deaths of the Egyptian policemen was not enough, but stopped short of recalling its envoy from Tel Aviv. With Egypt’s military rulers and caretaker Cabinet under populist pressure to take a firm stand, it was finally decided that a joint Egyptian Israeli investigation would be swiftly conducted into the matter. Until the outcome is made public, however, it is expected that neither Israel will issue an apology nor will Egypt recall its ambassador in Tel Aviv.
In the meantime, a few thousands Egyptian demonstrators, including a sizeable portion of Islamists among whom was the Salafi leading figure Safwat Higazi, protested angrily in front of the Israeli embassy in Cairo, which occupies the top floor of a high-rise building that overlooks the Nile in Giza. They called for the dismissal of the Israeli ambassador and the annulment of the peace treaty with Israel. To an exultant crowd in the street, one protestor scaled the building’s several floors at 2:00am to tear down the Star of David on top and replace it with an Egyptian flag.
The man who took down the flag, identified as Ahmed al-Shahat, became an instant idol, labeled on Twitter the “Egyptian Spiderman” and “FlagMan”, and described by one Egyptian presidential candidate, Hamdeen Sabahi, as “the people’s hero who burnt the Zionist flag that corrupted Egyptian air for 30 years”.
The spat highlighted the dilemma faced by the Military Council now ruling Egypt, caught between the need to preserve the 1979 peace treaty with Israel and populist hostility to the Jewish State. “Egyptian blood is not cheap and the government will not accept that Egyptian blood is spilt for nothing,” a Cabinet statement said.
A delegation led by an unidentified high-ranking Israeli envoy arrived in Cairo on a private plane from Tel Aviv on Sunday to a low-key reception. Airport sources said that four cars drove onto the tarmac to whisk the delegation away.
The Sinai: military vacuum
Egypt has bristled at Israeli suggestions that it had lost control over the Sinai Peninsula, where Islamist-led assaults against Egyptian targets and towns have recently escalated to an alarming level.
With its some 60,000square kilometres of land and 380,000 inhabitants, the Sinai forms a huge desert buffer zone between Egypt and Israel.
The terms of the Camp David Accords, the 1979 peace treaty signed by Egypt and Israel, make it difficult for Egypt to police the borders and maintain control in Sinai where well-armed Bedouin occasionally clash with security forces. The accords divide the peninsula into three zones denoted A, B, and C, that run its longitude from North to South; the farther the zone from Egypt and the closer to Israel the less Egyptian armed forces are allowed. Zone C is demilitarised; UN peacekeeping corps maintain a presence, while Egypt may deploy no more than 450 lightly armed border guards on the 266km frontier. After Israel pulled out of Gaza in 2005, Egypt proposed raising the number to 3,500 to help it secure its border with the Gaza Strip, but Israel refused, citing security concerns. In 2009, however, when the Islamist Hamas administration took over Gaza, the two countries agreed to raise the number of Egyptian guardsmen to 750.
Islamic emirate
The Sinai security predicament has allowed easy access to weapons in an area renowned for smuggling and lawlessness.
Cross-border tunnels built illegally between Egypt and Gaza are major inroads notorious for use in smuggling weapons, ammunition and devices used in criminal activity. Egyptian security forces have repeatedly cracked down on them but, with the reduced number of security personnel dictated by the peace agreement, were never able to put an end to the problem.
The reopening by the Egyptian Military Council of the crossing at Rafah last May made travel between Egypt and Gaza easy, and Islamist groups have taken advantage of weaker security. They waged attacks against several public utility and service establishments in the Sinai, as well as five attacks on a pipeline that carries natural gas to Israel.
On 29 July, the police station at the border town of al-Arish was the target of an attack by some 100 men masked in black, riding through town in land cruiser vehicles or motorcycles, armed with automatic weapons, and waving black flags inscribed with blatant Islamic slogans.
Islamist groups with alleged al-Qaeda links announced plans to establish an Islamic emirate in the peninsula, declaring that jihad is their path to enforce the sharia of Allah.
An “anti-terror” operation by the Egyptian army and police in the Sinai, netted 20 wanted men, including Palestinians and radical Islamists, in addition to hand grenades, machine guns, rocket-propelled grenades, ammunition, and a bomb-making factory.
The Bedouin predicament
“After Hamas reached power in 2006, Gaza became a base of political Islam,” Adel al-Dawi, expert in political Islam, told Watani. “Gaza thus spearheaded the wide spread of Islamist groups in Sinai.” Such groups were not new to Sinai, Mr Dawi points out; they had been there albeit in smaller numbers, and had waged the terrorist attacks in Sharm al-Sheikh in 2005 then in 2006.
Today, as Mr Dawi sees it, Islamists ride the current security void in Egypt and attempt to impose an “Islamic emirate”. This is a State based on the concept of ‘loyalty and enmity’; loyalty to God, and enmity against everyone who does not endorse the application of Islamic sharia. They
did not only succeed in attracting the Sinai people, but were able to enlist in their ranks Egyptian youth from various districts.
The Sinai Bedouin do not normally hold religious extremist inclinations, Dawi reminds, but their constant clashes with the Egyptian security forces, and the consistent State disregard of their development needs threw them into the bosom of the Islamists. At the back of all this, Mr Dawi explains, is that the lucrative arms and drugs trade the Bedouin have for decades been notorious for, and which represented their major source of income, was being threatened. The rough, mountainous landscape of Sinai, which the Bedouin know like the palm of their hand, made it child’s play for them to escape security hurdles. The security authority’s harsh handling of this particular predicament was absolutely inadequate, and utterly failed.
Another outstanding problem between the Bedouin and the Egyptian authorities has been the land issue. As Egypt allowed investors to purchase land for tourist projects in the Sinai, the Bedouin demanded to be entitled to such purchases. Considering the Bedouin culture is one of roaming, which totally contradicts the concept of owning land and which considers land as communal ownership, the authorities refused to allow the Bedouin to purchase land for fear they might simply sell it off to Israelis or Palestinians. Today, however, this problem must be resolved. According to expert in Israeli affairs Emad Gad, the State may put in all the conditions to guarantee the land remains in Egyptian hands.
Egyptian rights
Dr Gad criticises the lack of information regarding the recent border accident, which makes it difficult to reasonably analyse what happened. “The lack of information on the Egyptian side, versus the access to it on the Israeli side, places Egypt at a disadvantage, and gives the Israeli media the edge to project its perspective to the world.
The Camp David Accords, Dr Gad says, allow Egypt to demand to station more troops in Region C, and to call for international arbitration should Israel refuse. “Egypt should do that,” he says, “and should also join the Rome Statute, in order to be able to go to the International Criminal Court to demand a condemnation of the Israeli aggression and compensation for the death of Egyptian soldiers at the hands of the Israelis.”
But the Israelis claim the Egyptians were caught in the crossfire as Israel fought in self-defence against the Palestinians, Watani reminded Dr Gad. “This does not give them the right to trespass into Egypt’s border,” he says. “They should have asked the Egyptians to handle that end.”
The report by the UN peacekeeping force on border, which confirmed that the Israelis trespassed, Dr Gad says, makes Egypt entitled to an official apology; compensations; and a pledge that it would never happen again. If the Israeli side is intransigent, Egypt can go to the UN Security Council with its complaint.
“We should put matters into perspective,” says Gamal Bayoumi, former deputy to the minister of foreign affairs. “This is a border accident, and it should remain at that,” It should be handled by the diplomats not the politicians, he says.
Those who call for the annulment of the peace treaty, he says, disregard the fact that it works in Egypt’s interest, not against it; since it freezes Israel’s ability to wage war against Egypt. Yet some of its articles can definitely be revised, he says.
No war
Major General Adel Suleiman, director of the International Centre for Strategic and Future Studies, insists the issue of war or peace with Israel ought not to be trifled with by political movements especially, as he told Watani, “with so many out there willing to exploit it for their own benefit.” It is in the interest of Hamas, Syria, Hizbullah and Iran, Suleiman says, that Egypt should engage in war against Israel.
But is Israel keen on war with Egypt? Or is Egypt on a war path with Israel? Watani took the issue to the writer and analyst Nabil Zaki. Mr Zaki does not believe Israel would fight with Egypt, especially in view of its unfriendly relations with two non-Arab, Middle East countries: Iran and Turkey. “Israel can ill afford to be hostile to Egypt now,” he says. “And the US, Israel’s all-time ally, is mired in economic troubles of its own, so would not be in much of a position to support such a war.”
As for Egypt, Mr Zaki believes it cannot go to war against Israel since it needs to mobilise all its resources for development, to overcome the economic crisis it is now going through. “Calls for recalling the Egyptian ambassador in Tel Aviv are futile and ill-advised,” he says. “Egypt can be more effective if it threatens to stop exporting gas to Israel, or withdrawing from joint trade agreements such as the QIZ (Qualifying Industrial Zones), the trade agreement between Egypt, the US and Israel.
Waheed Abdel-Mageed of the al-Ahram Centre for Strategic Studies, calls for a revision of some articles of the Camp David Accords, “otherwise, the agreement will collapse, since Egypt will be unable to protect its borders.” But the keyword to bring Sinai into the fold, he insists, is one simple word: development.