For the first time in 35 years the army had to offer justifications for a photograph of Egyptian-Israeli military personnel appearing together in uniform. The picture, widely circulated across social media, was claimed to have been taken in Tel Aviv last week. “This is an old picture of one of the regular security coordination meetings that have been taking place three times a year, in Cairo, Tel Aviv and Rome, between Egyptian and Israeli military since 1982,” read a statement whose apologetic tone seemed designed to disassociate the current interim regime from suggestions its relations with Israel are anything but frosty. But the facts on the ground, argues Mohamed Esmat Seif Al-Dawla, a lawyer and commentator who for 35 years has been critical of the terms of the peace treaty signed between Egypt and Israel on 26 March 1979, suggest otherwise. Like every regime in power since the Anwar Al-Sadat singed the peace treaty the current interim authorities, says Seif Al-Dawla, are going “the extra mile — perhaps more than the regime of ousted president Hosni Mubarak and certainly more than that of the Brotherhood regime — to accommodate Israel in order to curry favour with the US”. Seif Al-Dawla's argument is based both on information from informed contacts and on recent reports that Israel has petitioned the US to reconsider its blocking of the military aid to Egypt that was part and parcel of the peace treaty. “A real opportunity to revisit the unfair terms of the peace treaty” was missed “in the wake of the 25 January Revolution when the world, including Israel and the US, were watching with surprise the political developments in Egypt and were willing to accommodate many demands that are now no longer open for discussion,” says Seif Al-Dawla. Another opportunity was missed during the rule of the Muslim Brotherhood. Seif Al-Dawla worked briefly as an advisor to ousted Muslim Brotherhood president Mohamed Morsi. He joined the presidential team, he says, on the assumption the new regime would take advantage of Western/Israeli recognition that Egypt's first elected Islamist ruler would pursue “much needed amendments” to a peace treaty that gives Israel a security and military advantage over Egypt. “It did not happen,” he says. “We clashed publicly over the matter and I realised that they were not prepared to approach the issue — maybe they wanted to work on it later — but I had to go because for me this was the mission.” Seif Al-Dawla, sometimes described as an Islamist leaning nationalist, has written extensively on what he says is excessive Egyptian subjugation to the US/Israeli agenda since the signing of the 1974 ceasefire between Egypt and Israel. This agenda, he argues, has been focused since the day the October War ended on reducing the regional influence of Egypt. “The peace treaty was really about the institutionalisation of US designs for Egypt. Since the peace treaty Egypt has been operating within a set of security arrangements that basically strips Cairo of any serious exercise of sovereignty over the best part of Sinai. It is because of these arrangements that Egypt is stuck with a serious security hazard in Sinai. This was predictable. The presence of the state has been hardly felt in the peninsula, if at all.” The current enhanced military presence in Sinai, he says, was given a green-light from Israel that will be withdrawn the moment Israel decides this presence no longer serves its interests. “It also comes with a price. The Egyptian authorities agreed to demolish hundreds of tunnels linking Egypt with besieged Gaza. The spin is the action was taken to block the penetration of arms and militants both ways, and sometimes to punish Hamas for its alleged intervention in Egypt's internal politics, but the reality is the tunnels were destroyed to accommodate Israeli wishes.” According to Seif Al-Dawla the situation today “goes way beyond the parameters set by Hosni Mubarak who, when all is said and done, was conscious of the national security arguments that Gaza needed a breathing space”. Mubarak, he says, was accommodating of some but not all demands to block the tunnels at the time when land crossings were all but permanently blocked. The 2005 crossing agreement signed by Egypt, Israel and the Palestinian Authority required the presence of a monitoring team from the European Union on the borders. This team was withdrawn when Hamas gained control of Gaza in the summer of 2007 and the PA was forced out of the Strip. “Because the agreement has been annexed to the security arrangements between Egypt and IsraelCairo cannot rescind it unilaterally even if it so wished. The agreement was yet another block in the security pillar the US is building to effectively reduce the weight of Egypt.” Meanwhile, says Seif Al-Dawla, the interim authorities are following the Muslim Brotherhood and Mubarak in facilitating Washington's designs for Egypt that were first-initiated under Sadat. They are continuing with the elimination of the public sector through ad hoc privitisation, replacing the state's economic influence with that of a narrow business community whose interests are directly linked to Israel and the US. “The peace treaty in and of itself announced Egypt's divorce from its onetime strong Arab base,” argues Seif Al-Dawla. “It was a unilateral agreement concluded away from any collective Arab consent.” Under Mubarak Egypt bowed further to the US /Israeli will. Having once sided with the Palestinians it became a facilitator of Palestinian-Israeli talks conducted under US hegemony and tailored to Israel's security agenda. And it did so, says Seif Al-Dawla, “with no regard at all for Arab national security interests or, indeed, its own”. After 35 years Egypt has added insult to injury by reducing public discourse on the Palestinian cause to the situation in Gaza, overlooking the humanitarian plight in the strip to focus on the political tug of war with Hamas. “It is shocking today to hear the media fanning Egyptian-Palestinian animosity when the real enemy seeking to undermine Egypt is Israel – a country with which we have a peace treaty,” says Seif Al-Dawla said. The recent display of official sensitivity over joint Egyptian-Israeli military meetings is only one example of the convoluted package that constitutes Egyptian-Israeli ties. The keenness of members of the business community that deal with Israel to draw a veil over their trade ties is another. “If you want to qualify it you can call it a forced peace,” says Seif Al-Dawla, a term he much prefers to the more current cold peace. This enforced peace arrived in steps which Seif Al-Dawla identifies as beginning with the 1967 war followed by US intervention in favour of Israel during the October War and its subsequent ceasefire arrangements that resulted in security arrangements that make any calls to amend the unfair terms of the peace treaty a redline. The consequences of the peace treaty, argues Seif Al-Dawla, are now glaringly apparent across the Arab world where any focus on the Palestinian cause has been replaced by inter-Arab conflicts, either between or within countries, and inter-faith disputes. There is one thing, though, that Seif Al-Dawla is counting on: a collective public consciousness that despite 35 years of state-orchestrated efforts still perceives Israel as an enemy. Seif Al-Dawla points to the demonstrations months after the ouster of Mubarak that forced the Israeli embassy out of the Giza offices had been its base since the first Israeli ambassador arrived in Egypt. It was the public, he says, that forced the moment just as it has forced the ouster of two successive regimes. And sooner or later, he says, it will be the public that forces amendments to the treaty, whether the US and Israel like it or not.
